David Gross

David J. Gross

David Jonathan Gross
Born February 19, 1941 (1941-02-19) (age 69)
Washington, D.C., USA
Residence United States
Nationality United States
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of California, Santa Barbara
Harvard University
Princeton University
Alma mater Hebrew University
University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor Geoffrey Chew
Doctoral students Frank Wilczek
Edward Witten
William E. Caswell
Rajesh Gopakumar
Known for Asymptotic freedom
Heterotic string
Notable awards Dirac Medal (1988)
Nobel Prize in Physics (2004)

David Jonathan Gross (born February 19, 1941 in Washington, D.C.) is an American particle physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is currently the director and holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Academic career

David Gross and his wife in Santa Barbara
Construction works at Kavli Institute

He was born on February 19, 1941 to a Jewish family and raised in the United States. His father was Bertram Myron Gross (1912–1998). Gross received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 under the supervision of Geoffrey Chew.

In 1973, Gross, working with his first graduate student, Frank Wilczek, at Princeton University, discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction (or color charge) between them; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. Asymptotic freedom, independently discovered by Politzer, was important for the development of quantum chromodynamics.

He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Professor at Princeton University until 1997. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 and the Dirac Medal in 1988.

Gross, with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm also formulated the theory of the heterotic string.

Honours and awards

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References

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