Pieter Willem "Piet" Kasteleyn (12 October 1924 – 16 January 1996) was a Dutch physicist famous for his contributions to the field of

statistical mechanics In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. It does not assume or postulate any natural laws, but explains the macroscopic be ...

Biography

Pieter Willem Kasteleyn was born in Leiden on 12 October 1924. After finishing high school in 1942, Kasteleyn briefly studied chemistry in Amsterdam. After the war, Leiden University reopened, where he undertook the study of physics and graduated in 1951. He defended his Ph.D. thesis working under S.R. de Groot in 1956. In 1963 Kasteleyn was nominated Full Professor at the Lorentz Institute of Theoretical Physics in Leiden. In 1979 he was elected a member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

. From 1981 to 1985 he acted as secretary of the Physics Section of the Academy. From 1978 to 1984 he was chairman of the Commission for Theoretical Physics of the Dutch National Physics Foundation. He retired in 1985. He died on 16 January 1996, after an unexpected and short illness.

Research

While investigating dimers on a

square lattice In mathematics, the square lattice is a type of lattice in a two-dimensional Euclidean space. It is the two-dimensional version of the integer lattice, denoted as . It is one of the five types of two-dimensional lattices as classified by their ...

(essentially a

domino tiling In geometry, a domino tiling of a region in the Euclidean plane is a tessellation of the region by dominoes, shapes formed by the union of two unit squares meeting edge-to-edge. Equivalently, it is a perfect matching in the grid graph formed by p ...

), he independently discovered combinatorial Fisher-Kasteleyn-Temperley algorithm. In a series of papers with C. M. Fortuin he developed

random cluster model In statistical mechanics, probability theory, graph theory, etc. the random cluster model is a random graph that generalizes and unifies the Ising model, Potts model, and percolation model. It is used to study random combinatorial structures, elec ...

and obtained the

FKG inequality In mathematics, the Fortuin–Kasteleyn–Ginibre (FKG) inequality is a correlation inequality, a fundamental tool in statistical mechanics and probabilistic combinatorics (especially random graphs and the probabilistic method), due to . Informally ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kasteleyn, Pieter 1996 deaths 1924 births 20th-century Dutch physicists Leiden University alumni Leiden University faculty Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences