Norman Christ

Norman Howard Christ (/ˈkrɪst/; born 22 December 1943 in Pittsburgh) is a physicist and a professor at Columbia University, where he holds the Ephraim Gildor Professorship of Computational Theoretical Physics. He graduated Salutatorian with an undergraduate degree in physics from Columbia in 1965 and received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1966 under Nobel Laureate Tsung-Dao Lee. Christ became a professor at Columbia after graduation, and has remained there since. He is also a leading researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His current research lies in the fields of quantum chromodynamics and quantum field theory, which he conducts largely using the twin QCDSP supercomputers at Columbia and Brookhaven. QCDSP is an abbreviation of "Quantum ChromoDynamics on Digital Signal Processors". Likewise, Christ is also a collaborator on the QCDOC supercomputer, or "Quantum ChromoDynamics On a Chip".

Important contributions to physics

• Christ helped create the QCD Teraflops supercomputer project.
• He has been instrumental in the development of the Columbia-Brookhaven QCDSP project, for which he, Robert Mawhinney, and Pavlos Vranas were awarded the 1998 Gordon Bell Prize (see CQFT Homepage).
• Christ has also been a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

Publications

• Ping Chen, Norman H. Christ, George Tamminga Fleming, Adrian Kaehler, Catalin Malureanu, Robert Mawhinney, Gabriele Siegert, Cheng-zhong Sui, Yuri Zhestkov (Columbia U.), Pavlos M. Vranas (Illinois U., Urbana), "Toward the Chiral Limit of QCD: Quenched and Dynamical Domain Wall Fermions", in Vancouver 1998, High energy physics, vol. 2, 1802-1808.
• Dong Chen, Ping Chen, Norman H. Christ, George Tamminga Fleming, Alan Gara, Chulwoo Jung, Adrian L. Kaehler, Yu-bing Luo, Catalin I. Malureanu, Robert D. Mawhinney, John Parsons, Cheng-Zhong Sui, Pavlos M. Vranos, Yuri Zhestkov (Columbia U.), Robert G. Edwards, Anthony D. Kennedy (Florida State U.), Sten Hansen (Fermilab), Gregory W. Kilcup (Ohio State U.), "Status of the QCD Project", Nucl. Phys. Proc. Suppl. 73, 898 (1999).
• [http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/wwwhepau/wwwscan?rawcmd=Christ,+Norman+H. All publications] from the INSPIRE-HEP Literature Database.

External links

• Norman Christ's Columbia faculty homepage
  • Columbia University Computational Field Theory homepage
  • Columbia University Theoretical Physics homepage
• Christ's Doctoral Dissertation – "Possible Tests of the C_st and T_st Invariance of Electromagnetic Phenomena."
• PARTICLE PHYSICS: Monster Machines – Science, 16 May 2003
• Computing the Quarks, Symmetry magazine, November 2005
• Lattice Gauge Theory at Brookhaven National Laboratory