Kenneth G. Wilson

Kenneth G. Wilson was an American theoretical physicist who lived from 1936 to 2013, renowned for developing the renormalization group approach to critical phenomena and phase transitions, along with contributions to lattice field theory, lattice QCD and quark confinement. He earned his doctorate at Caltech in 1961 under Murray Gell-Mann, joined Cornell University in 1963 as the James A. Weeks Professor of Physics and later directed its Center for Theory and Simulation from 1985, before moving to Ohio State University in 1988. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1982 for his work on critical phenomena, along with the Franklin Medal the same year, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1980, shared with Michael E. Fisher and Leo Kadanoff.