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Mathematical physics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents
1 Scope of the subject
2 Prominent mathematical physicists
3 Mathematically rigorous physics
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
7 Further reading
7.1 The Classics
7.2 Textbooks for undergraduate studies
7.3 Textbooks for graduate studies
7.4 Other specialised subareas
The theory of atomic spectra (and, later, quantum mechanics) developed almost
concurrently with the mathematical fields of linear algebra, the spectral theory
of operators, and more broadly, functional analysis. These constitute the
mathematical basis of another branch of mathematical physics.
The special and general theories of relativity require a rather different type of
mathematics. This was group theory: and it played an important role in both
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quantum field theory and differential geometry. This was, however, gradually
supplemented by topology in the mathematical description of cosmological as
well as quantum field theory phenomena.
Statistical mechanics forms a separate field, which is closely related with the
more mathematical ergodic theory and some parts of probability theory.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, important French figures
were Pierre-Simon Laplace [1749–1827] (in mathematical astronomy, potential
theory, and mechanics) and Siméon Denis Poisson [1781–1840] (who also
worked in mechanics and potential theory). In Germany, both Carl Friedrich
Gauss [1777–1855] (in magnetism) and Carl Gustav Jacobi [1804–1851] (in the
areas of dynamics and canonical transformations) made key contributions to the
theoretical foundations of electricity, magnetism, mechanics, and fluid dynamics.
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The nineteenth century also saw the Scot, James Clerk Maxwell [1831–1879],
win renown for his four equations of electromagnetism, and his countryman,
Lord Kelvin [1824–1907] make substantial discoveries in thermodynamics.
Among the English physics community, Lord Rayleigh [1842–1919] worked on
sound; and George Gabriel Stokes [1819–1903] was a leader in optics and fluid
dynamics; while the Irishman William Rowan Hamilton [1805–1865] was noted
for his work in dynamics. The German Hermann von Helmholtz [1821–1894] is
best remembered for his work in the areas of electromagnetism, waves, fluids,
and sound. In the U.S.A., the pioneering work of Josiah Willard Gibbs
[1839–1903] became the basis for statistical mechanics. Together, these men
laid the foundations of electromagnetic theory, fluid dynamics and statistical
mechanics.
The late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw the birth of special
relativity. This had been anticipated in the works of the Dutchman, Hendrik
Lorentz [1853–1928], with important insights from Jules-Henri Poincaré
[1854–1912], but which were brought to full clarity by Albert Einstein
[1879–1955]. Einstein then developed the invariant approach further to arrive
at the remarkable geometrical approach to gravitational physics embodied in
general relativity. This was based on the non-Euclidean geometry created by
Gauss and Riemann in the previous century.
The other great revolutionary development of the twentieth century has been
quantum theory, which emerged from the seminal contributions of Max Planck
[1856–1947] (on black body radiation) and Einstein's work on the photoelectric
effect. This was, at first, followed by a heuristic framework devised by Arnold
Sommerfeld [1868–1951] and Niels Bohr [1885–1962], but this was soon
replaced by the quantum mechanics developed by Max Born [1882–1970],
Werner Heisenberg [1901–1976], Paul Dirac [1902–1984], Erwin Schrödinger
[1887–1961], and Wolfgang Pauli [1900–1958]. This revolutionary theoretical
framework is based on a probabilistic interpretation of states, and evolution and
measurements in terms of self-adjoint operators on an infinite dimensional vector
space (Hilbert space, introduced by David Hilbert [1862–1943]). Paul Dirac, for
example, used algebraic constructions to produce a relativistic model for the
electron, predicting its magnetic moment and the existence of its antiparticle,
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the positron.
The field has concentrated in three main areas: (1) quantum field theory,
especially the precise construction of models; (2) statistical mechanics,
especially the theory of phase transitions; and (3) nonrelativistic quantum
mechanics (Schrödinger operators), including the connections to atomic and
molecular physics.
See also
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Notes
1. ^ Definition from the Journal of Mathematical Physics. http://jmp.aip.org/jmp/staff.jsp
References
Rashed, Roshdi; Morelon, Régis (1996), Encyclopedia of the History of
Arabic Science, 1 & 3, Routledge, ISBN 0415124107
Zalsow, Eric (2005), Physmatics (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0506153) ,
The Journal of Business, http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0506153
Further reading
The Classics
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