Talk:Frank Wilczek

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Chicago Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Chicago, which aims to improve all articles related to Chicago.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]

	Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
High	This article is on a subject of high importance within physics.
Help with this template This article has been rated but has no comments. If appropriate, please review the article and leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Contents 1 Polish-American 2 Copyvio 3 Removed Section that Needs Rewriting 4 WikiProject class rating 5 Selected papers 6 My reverted edits 7 Doctoral Students

[edit] Polish-American

I made an edit to the intro/header trying to conform to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies). I moved Mr. Wilczek's ethnic descent down to where it talks about his birth and education. This seems to flow pretty well. I have discussed this with one other editor but would appreciate any other comments or suggestions on how we can improve this article with the respect it deserves. Thanks!! --Tom 16:20, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

This change looks like an improvement to me too. betsythedevine 17:27, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copyvio

Unfortunately, in looking for the source of the first person statement, I discovered that the bulk of the article was copied verbatim from Dr. Wilczek's Nobel autobiography, simply with first person changed to third person. That's a big no-no!

However, perhaps since Dr. Wilczek's wife is one of the editors on this page (Hi Betsy!), she could ask her husband to release the same content under GFDL or to the public-domain. That certainly seems like the most elegant solution to the problem. LotLE×talk 15:46, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Bit more: Looking through the history, it appears the copyvio material was added by Bunzil in this edit: [1]. The version prior to that actually looks perfectly good, and perhaps even more encyclopedic (even with the change of grammatical person, the autobiography reads in a too personalistic tone... which is fine for autobiography, but not for us). Maybe we should roll back to the version before that? LotLE×talk 16:08, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Dear LuLu, the intention was that the material was a starting point. It was going to be unrecognisable after heavy editing. Work in progress :-) Rollback is a bad idea because it might affect other edits unrelated to the problem. So I've removed the offending section and have pasted it below as a place holder until we hear from Betsy or until someone gets around to rewriting it. Best regards, bunix 01:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, starting with something that is a copyright violation, and rewriting it repeatedly doesn't solve the problem. No matter how much it is derived at the wording level, it remains a derived work. At a certain point it may be more be difficult to recognize the violation, but it still remains one. Moreover, the edit history proves the case. I doubt Wilczek (or the Nobel committee, or whoever holds the copyright) would actually sue Wikipedia... but the fact they could is the reason admins and bureaucrats (and me too) have become so careful about copyright issues. Of course, if Betsy arranged release as GFDL, that's the best of all possible worlds... Betsy? LotLE×talk 02:32, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Lulu et al--Frank says he thinks the Nobel Committee may own the copyright on the bio he wrote for them. It was very sweet of Bunzil to try to reframe it in third person, but I'm not sure that the very personal first-personness of it stands up so well to that treatment. So I guess my suggestion would be to mine out any actual "notable" facts from it and keep the external link to the bio itself for those who want more...I'm mostly offline for a few days, and counting my pennies in wifi cafes when I'm online, so forgive the brevity and lateness of this reply! betsythedevine 18:38, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that seems entirely right. The tone of Frank's autobio is... well, autobiographical. We are better off just to read it for facts, then express those facts in our own encyclopedic words. Have fun counting those pennies (but doesn't the Nobel award give you quite a few of them?) LotLE×talk 21:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Alas, once a Nobel prize has been shared with two other people, there are hardly any pennies left. Also in the US they tax the prize which is a bummer. bunix 12:43, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Well... ISTM that >$1M * 1/3 * ~60% (after tax) is still a chunk of change. No, it's not Ken Lay money. But it ain't a bad bonus... very well deserved, I am certain (or would be if I were able to have the slightest understanding of just what the winning work was :-)). I'm gonna have to go win me one of those... LotLE×talk 13:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi LuLu, Well I make that $200,000 which doesn't even buy a house these days :-) I think it is a poor some of money for such a big acheivement. I'd like to win one too though, but more for the fun not the dough :-) Let's work on it! bunix 11:38, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removed Section that Needs Rewriting

Please can someone re-write these passages, unless we hear from Betsy:

He always loved all kinds of puzzles, games, and mysteries. Some of mhis earliest memories are about the questions he "worked on" even before he went to school. When he was learning about money, he spent a lot of time trying out various schemes of exchanging different kinds of money (e.g., pennies, nickels, and dimes) in complicated ways back and forth, hoping to discover a way to come out ahead. Another project was to find ways of getting very big numbers in a few steps. He discovered simple forms of repeated exponentiation and recursion for himself. Generating large numbers made him feel powerful as a child.

His parents were children during the time of the Great Depression, and their families struggled to get by. This experience shaped many of their attitudes, and especially their aspirations for him. They put very great stock in education, and in the security that technical skill could bring. When he did well in school they were very pleased, and he was encouraged to think about becoming a doctor or an engineer. As he was growing up his father, who worked in electronics, was taking night classes. Their little apartment was full of old radios and early-model televisions, and with the books his father was studying. It was the time of the Cold War. Space exploration was a new and exciting prospect, nuclear war a frightening one; both were ever-present in newspapers, TV, and movies. At school, he had regular air raid drills. All this made a big impression on him. He got the idea that there was secret knowledge that, when mastered, would allow Mind to control Matter in seemingly magical ways.

Another thing that shaped his thinking was religious training. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He loved the idea that there was a great drama and a grand plan behind existence. Later, under the influence of Bertrand Russell's writings and his increasing awareness of scientific knowledge, he lost faith in conventional religion.

He went to public schools in Queens, and was fortunate to have excellent teachers. Because the schools were big, they could support specialized and advanced classes. At Martin van Buren High School there was a group of thirty or so who went to many such classes together, and both supported and competed with one another. More than half went on to successful scientific or medical careers.

He arrived at the University of Chicago with large but amorphous ambitions. He flirted with brain science, but soon decided that the central questions were not ready for mathematical treatment, and that he lacked the patience for laboratory work. he read voraciously in many subjects, but he wound up majoring in mathematics, largely because doing that gave him the most freedom. During his last term at Chicago, he took a course about the use of symmetry and group theory in physics from Peter Freund. Freund was an extremely enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, and Wilczek felt an instinctive resonance with the material. He went to Princeton University as a graduate student in the math department, but kept a close eye on what was going on in physics. He became aware that deep ideas involving mathematical symmetry were turning up at the frontiers of physics; specifically, the gauge theory of electroweak interactions, and the scaling symmetry in Wilson's theory of phase transitions.

The great event of his early career was to help discover the basic theory of the strong force, QCD. The equations of QCD are based on gauge symmetry principles, and he make progress with them using (approximate) scaling symmetry.

An aspect of his later work has been to use insights and methods from "fundamental" physics to address "applied" questions, and vice versa. bunix 01:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 14:29, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Selected papers

I suggest the "selected papers" should be links to www.arXiv.org where possible, rather than to MIT's own PDF repository. arXiv gives access to other formats, "cited by" and "refers to" information, etc. I will implement this if no objection is raised. Dark Formal (talk) 04:35, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] My reverted edits

First of all, I don't understand why the summary should put David Politzer before David Gross in the list of 2004 co-winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize. Frank Wilczek worked with David Gross, not with David Politzer. Politzer before Gross is not alphabetical order, not the order used by the Nobel Committee. Why is it here?

And what is World Knowledge Dialogue Board doing in the article summary? I'm not sure anyone's many board memberships [2] are Wikipedia material at all unless activities on one or more of them are so significant as to create real news stories.

I also think that "They have two children" was an improvement over what it got reverted to, "and together have two children". But I don't want to get into any squabbles, especially with someone who seems to be making some hard-working changes for the better to other parts of the article, so I'm just making my case on this talk page. betsythedevine (talk) 10:30, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Doctoral Students

Wasn't John March-Russell a Sidney Coleman student at Harvard? That's what HEPNAMES says. Frank visited Harvard for a year, but I don't think he could have officially been anyone's thesis advisor there. Dark Formal (talk) 21:21, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

John March-Russell's online CV lists both as advisors. [3] When Frank was at Harvard, he had the opportunity to work closely with several incredibly bright young students, including John March-Russell, Mark Alford, and Martin Greiter, who later traveled to spend time expanding on those earlier conversations. But I don't really understand the arcana about saying which of the people you work with is your thesis advisor. I know that Sam Treiman did a lot of his grad research with Enrico Fermi although when he started grad work at Chicago his official advisor was John Simpson; his WP article lists both as his advisors. betsythedevine (talk) 08:49, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I guess it depends what you mean by "thesis advisor", "doctoral student", etc. The unambiguous definition is the professor who is officially in charge of the student according to the university. In March-Russell's case that was Coleman. But I agree that Frank inspired and worked closely with March-Russell and others, even though he wasn't their official thesis advisor, so I don't want to take their names off the list. I added a "(*)" flag to the joint students, to clarify the relationship. I don't know who Greiter's official Harvard advisor was. Dark Formal (talk) 22:47, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

This sounds to me like an admirable solution. betsythedevine (talk) 23:32, 27 May 2008 (UTC)