Robert Swendsen

Robert Haakon Swendsen is a physicist and a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known in the computational physics community for the Swendsen-Wang algorithm, the Monte Carlo Renormalization Group and related methods that enable efficient computational studies of equilibrium phenomena near phase transitions. The American Physical Society gave him its Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics in 2014, the same year he received Carnegie Mellon's Julius Ashkin Teaching Award. He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University and his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also known for his teaching and for his textbook, An Introduction to Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics, whose second edition was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.