Pieter Willem "Piet" Kasteleyn (12 October 1924 – 16 January 1996) was a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

famous for his contributions to the field of statistical mechanics.

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. 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 (essentially a domino tiling), 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.

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