Barry Martin Simon (born 16 April 1946) is an American mathematical physicist and was the IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (particularly Schrödinger operators), including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 400 publications on mathematics and physics.
His work has focused on broad areas of mathematical physics and analysis covering: quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, Brownian motion, random matrix theory, general nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (including N-body systems and resonances), nonrelativistic quantum mechanics in electric and magnetic fields, the semi-classical limit, the singular continuous spectrum, random and ergodic Schrödinger operators, orthogonal polynomials, and non-selfadjoint spectral theory.
Early life
Barry Simon's mother was a school teacher, his father was an accountant. Simon attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
Career
During his high school years, Simon started attending college courses for highly gifted pupils at Columbia University. In 1962, Simon won a MAA mathematics competition. The New York Times reported that in order to receive full credits for a faultless test result he had to make a submission with MAA. In this submission he proved that one of the problems posed in the test was ambiguous.
In 1962, Simon entered Harvard with a stipend. He became a Putnam Fellow in 1965 at 19 years old. He received his AB in 1966 from Harvard College and his PhD in Physics at Princeton University in 1970, supervised by Arthur Strong Wightman. His dissertation dealt with Quantum mechanics for Hamiltonians defined as quadratic forms.
Following his doctoral studies, Simon took a professorship at Princeton for several years, often working with colleague Elliott H. Lieb on the Thomas-Fermi Theory and Hartree-Fock Theory of atoms in addition to phase transitions and mentoring many of the same students as Lieb. He eventually was persuaded to take a post at Caltech, from which he retired in the summer of 2016.
His status is legendary in mathematical physics and he is renowned for his ability to write scientific manuscripts "in five percent of the time ordinary mortals need to write such papers."
A former graduate student of Simon's, in a tale revealing of his brilliance, once stated:
Honors and awards
1974: Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver 1981: Elected fellow of the American Physical Society 1990: Elected correspondent member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences 2005: Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012: Elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society 2012: Awarded the Henri Poincaré Prize 2015: Awarded the Bolyai Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 2016: Awarded the Steele Prize for Lifetime achievements 2018: Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the American Physical Society 2019: Elected to the National Academy of Sciences