Herbert Wagner (born 6 April 1935) is a German theoretical physicist, who mainly works in
statistical mechanics. He is a
professor emeritus
''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...
of
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
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Biography
Wagner was one of the last students of German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent serie ...
, with whom he worked on magnetism.
As a postdoc at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
, he and
David Mermin
Nathaniel David Mermin (; born 30 March 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term " boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on sol ...
(and independently of
Pierre Hohenberg) proved a "no-go theorem", otherwise known as the
Mermin–Wagner theorem
In quantum field theory and statistical mechanics, the Mermin–Wagner theorem (also known as Mermin–Wagner–Hohenberg theorem, Mermin–Wagner–Berezinskii theorem, or Coleman theorem) states that continuous symmetries cannot be spontaneously ...
. The theorem states that continuous symmetries cannot be
spontaneously broken at finite temperature in systems with sufficiently short-range interactions in dimensions
.
Wagner is the academic father of a generation of statistical physicists. Many of his students and junior collaborators now occupy chairs in German universities, including
Hans Werner Diehl (Essen),
Siegfried Dietrich (Wuppertal, then
Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung Stuttgart),
Gerhard Gompper (
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ here for short) is a national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates research infrastructures with a focus on supercomputers. Cu ...
),
Reinhard Lipowsky (
Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
The Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung'') is located in Potsdam-Golm Science Park in Golm, Potsdam, Germany. It was founded in 1990 as a successor of the Institu ...
, Berlin),
Hartmut Löwen (Düsseldorf),
Klaus Mecke (Erlangen),
and Udo Seifert (Stuttgart).
Awards
In 1992, Wagner was awarded an
honorary degree
An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hon ...
by the University of
Essen (now
University of Duisburg-Essen
The University of Duisburg-Essen (german: link=no, Universität Duisburg-Essen) is a public research university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the 2019 ''Times Higher Education World University Rankings'', the university was awarded ...
). In 2016 he received the
Max Planck Medal
The Max Planck medal is the highest award of the German Physical Society , the world's largest organization of physicists, for extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics. The prize has been awarded annually since 1929, with few exceptions, ...
for his fundamental works on the statistical physics of low-dimensional systems.
References
20th-century German physicists
1935 births
Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Living people
Theoretical physicists
Winners of the Max Planck Medal
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