Sunday, March 30, 2014

Wilson has two papers published when Cornell tenured him, after two years. You are NOT KG Wilson.

"The people at Cornell had more of an interest to know what I was doing than people at Harvard, because they were going to have to make a decision... Of course one of the things that happened was, as you may or may not be aware, is that they gave me tenure after only two years and with no publication record. In fact, there was one or two papers on the publications list when I was taken for tenure and Francis Low complained that I should have made sure there was none. Just to prove that it was possible. "

Kenneth G. Wilson, Nobel Prize 1982, re his first assistant professorship. He had done his PhD at Caltech under Gell-Mann and Feynman was his examiner (so to speak), was a Junior Fellow at Harvard (spending lunchtime conversations with MIT--Low, Johnson,...), was at CERN at some point, and then went to Cornell. From his Caltech days on he was working lots on approximations, computer ways of doing this, as well as more "analytical" work.

No comments: