Robert Mills

Robert Mills was an American theoretical physicist who, as a young research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1953 and 1954, worked with Chen-Ning Yang to develop what became known as Yang-Mills theory, a generalization of Maxwell's electromagnetism to non-Abelian gauge symmetries. Published in 1954 as Conservation of Isotopic Spin and Isotopic Gauge Invariance, the theory attracted little attention for two decades before becoming, in the 1970s, the mathematical scaffolding of the Standard Model, underlying the strong and electroweak forces alike. Born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1927, Mills served in the United States Merchant Marine before earning degrees from Columbia University and Cambridge University. After a period at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he joined the physics faculty at Ohio State University in 1956, where he taught for thirty-nine years until his retirement in 1995, working chiefly on the theory of alloys and many-body physics. He died in 1999 at the age of seventy-two.