Freeman Dyson

Also known as Freeman J. Dyson

theoretical physicist and mathematician (1923–2020)

AI overview

Freeman Dyson was a theoretical physicist and mathematician who lived from 1923 to 2020 and made significant contributions to fundamental physics. His work bridged mathematics and physics in ways that influenced modern scientific understanding, making him an important figure in 20th-century science.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1923
Died: 2020
Works: 49

Top works

What Are You Optimistic About?
The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011
The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011
Daison hakushi no taiyō genomu intānetto
Dyson Quantenfeldtheorie

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1923-12-15
Active to: 2020-02-28

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 461
Total plays: 561

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification
· 1978 · cited 12,642x
Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010
· 2012 · cited 10,740x
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010
· 2012 · cited 9,223x
The UK Biobank resource with deep phenotyping and genomic data
· 2018 · cited 8,729x
A Set of Measures of Centrality Based on Betweenness
· 1977 · cited 7,946x

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Quotes

“The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress. (2014 interview)”
“The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. (New York Review of Books, 2011)”
“It has been generally believed that only the complex numbers could legitimately be used as the ground field in discussing quantum-mechanical operators. Over the complex field, Frobenius' theorem is of course not valid; the only division algebra over the complex field is formed by the complex numbers themselves. However, Frobenius' theorem is relevant precisely because the appropriate ground field for much of quantum mechanics is real rather than complex.”
“I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.”
“Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't.”
“As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”

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Wikidata facts

Official website: www.ias.edu/sns/dyson
Image: Freeman Dyson.jpg

Show 8 more facts

birth name: Freeman John Dyson
date of birth: 1923-12-15
Commons category: Freeman Dyson
Erdős number: 2
Commons gallery: Freeman Dyson
date of death: 2020-02-28
name in native language: Freeman Dyson
P12749: Survivor Series (2003)

Sources (11)

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~37 min read

Article

Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Dyson originated several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson's transform, a fundamental technique in additive number theory, which he developed as part of his proof of Mann's theorem; the Dyson tree, a hypothetical genetically engineered plant capable of growing in a comet; the Dyson series, a perturbative series where each term is represented by Feynman diagrams; the Dyson sphere, a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a space-faring civilization would meet its energy requirements with a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output; and Dyson's eternal intelligence, a means by which an immortal society of intelligent beings in an open universe could escape the prospect of the heat death of the universe by extending subjective time to infinity while expending only a finite amount of energy.