Joseph Leon Birman (May 21, 1927 in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

– October 1, 2016 in

New Rochelle New Rochelle (; older french: La Nouvelle-Rochelle) is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States, in the southeastern portion of the state. In 2020, the city had a population of 79,726, making it the seventh-largest in the state o ...

) was an American theoretical

solid-state physicist Solid-state physics is the study of rigid matter, or solids, through methods such as quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state physics studies how th ...

Life

Birman was the son of a salesman. He went to the

Bronx High School of Science The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Sp ...

(graduated in 1943) then studied at City College of New York, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1947. He next attended

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, gaining a master's degree in 1950 and a PhD in theoretical chemistry in 1952. He then spent about ten years at an electronics and telecommunications research lab (later GTE Research Labs in Queens) in New York where he studied the optical properties of semiconductors. From 1962 he was a professor at New York University and from 1974 professor at the City College of New York. Most recently, he was Distinguished Professor at CUNY. From 1969 to 1970 he was a guest professor in Paris. In 1974 he became received an honorary doctorate from the

University of Rennes The University of Rennes is a public research university which will be officially reconstituted on 1 January 2023 and located in the city of Rennes, in Upper Brittany, France. The University of Rennes has been divided for almost 50 years, before ...

. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, and was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science The is an Independent Administrative Institution in Japan, established for the purpose of contributing to the advancement of science in all fields of the natural and social sciences and the humanities.JSPSweb page History The Japan Society for ...

, and the

New York Academy of Sciences The New York Academy of Sciences (originally the Lyceum of Natural History) was founded in January 1817 as the Lyceum of Natural History. It is the fourth oldest scientific society in the United States. An independent, nonprofit organization wi ...

. Birman organized symposia in the 1970s between American and Soviet scientists in Moscow, New York and St. Petersburg. In particular, he mostly supported Jewish scholars in the Soviet Union, who were denied exit (Birman himself was the grandson of Jewish grandparents who emigrated from Russia). In the 1990s he organized a support program with

Pierre Hohenberg Pierre C. Hohenberg (3 October 1934 – 15 December 2017) was a French-American theoretical physicist, who worked primarily on statistical mechanics. Hohenberg studied at Harvard, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degr ...

for scientists who had emigrated to the United States, especially from Eastern Europe and China. In 2010, he received the

Andrei Sakharov Prize The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, commonly known as the Sakharov Prize, is an honorary award for individuals or groups who have dedicated their lives to the defence of human rights and freedom of thought. Named after Russian scientis ...

of the American Physical Society, of whose Human Rights Committee he was a member of. In 2006, he received the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1950 he married the mathematician

Joan Birman Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman (born May 30, 1927, in New York CityLarry Riddle., ''Biographies of Women Mathematicians'', at Agnes Scott College) is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to t ...

. They had two sons and a daughter.

Works

* ''Theory of Crystal Space Groups and Lattice Dynamics: Infrared and Raman Optical Process in Insulating Crystals.'' In: ''Handbuch der Physik.'' 1974, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-69707-4 1

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Birman, Joseph L 1927 births 2016 deaths 20th-century American physicists City College of New York faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society New York University faculty Scientists from New York City City College of New York alumni Columbia University alumni