Leo Kadanoff

Leo Kadanoff was an American physicist who lived from 1937 to 2015, known for developing the renormalization group theory of phase transitions and for showing how sudden changes in material properties can be understood through scaling and universality. He earned his degrees from Harvard University, completed postdoctoral work at the Niels Bohr Institute, and held faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Brown University and, from 1978, the University of Chicago, where he became the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999, the Lorentz Medal in 2006 and the Isaac Newton Medal in 2011, and served as president of the American Physical Society in 2007. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1980, shared with Kenneth G. Wilson and Michael E. Fisher.