Esther Dyson

Thursday, 14 June 2012

upload

go to the top
About WN
Contact
Feedback
Privacy Policy
© 2012 World News Inc., all Rights Reserved

Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

Applied mathematics

name	Esther Dyson
birth date	July 14, 1951
birth place	Zürich, Switzerland }}

Name	Andreas S. Weigend Ph.D
Residence	San Francisco Bay Area
Nationality	German
Field	Computer Science
Work institutions	University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, & Tsinghua University
Known for	Expertise in: Personalization & discovery Metrics & Measurements Incentive Design }}

Name	Freeman Dyson
Birth date	December 15, 1923
Birth place	Crowthorne, Berkshire, England
Nationality	American British
Field	Physics, Mathematics
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Work institutions	Royal Air Force Institute for Advanced Study Duke University Cornell University
Doctoral advisor	Hans Bethe
Doctoral students
Known for	Dyson sphere Dyson operator Advocacy against nuclear weapons Dyson conjecture Dyson's eternal intelligence Dyson number Dyson tree Dyson's transform
Influences	Richard Feynman
Prizes	Heineman Prize (1965) Harvey Prize (1977) Wolf Prize (1981) Templeton Prize (2000) Pomeranchuk Prize (2003) Fermi Award (1993)
Religion	Christian
Footnotes	He is notably the son of George Dyson (composer), and father of Esther Dyson, Dorothy Dyson, Mia Dyson, Rebecca Dyson, Emily Dyson, and George Dyson (science historian). }}

Dyson's father was the English composer Sir George Dyson; his mother was trained as a lawyer but after Dyson was born worked as a social worker. Despite sharing a last name, he is not related to the early 20th century astronomer Frank Watson Dyson, but as a small boy Freeman Dyson was aware of Frank Watson Dyson. Freeman credits the popularity of an astronomer with the same last name as having inadvertently helped to spark his interest in science.

Dyson has six children, two of them (Esther and George) with his first wife, mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, and the other four with his second wife, Imme Dyson, a masters runner who married him in 1958. Due to issues with some of his children not being recognized as British citizens he abjured his allegiance to Britain, and became a naturalized American citizen.

His eldest daughter Esther is a digital technology consultant. His son George is a historian of science, one of whose books is ''Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965''.

Friends and colleagues describe him as shy and self-effacing with a contrarian streak that his friends find refreshing but his intellectual opponents find exasperating. "I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice," physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said of him. His friend, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, said: "A favorite word of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word ''subversive''. He feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life."

Career [link]

Although Dyson has won numerous scientific awards, he has never won a Nobel Prize, which has led Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg to state that the Nobel committee has "fleeced" Dyson. Dyson has said that “I think it’s almost true without exception if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get hold of some deep and important problem and stay with it for 10 years. That wasn’t my style.”

Dyson was a Scholar at the renowned Winchester College from 1936 to 1941. He was received (as one of 20 distinguished Old Wykehamists) on 4 May 2011 at the Ad Portas celebration, the highest honour that the College bestows. After leaving Winchester he joined the operational research section at RAF Bomber Command, where he remained for the rest of World War II. After the war, he obtained a BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge (1945) and was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1946 to 1949. In 1947 he moved to the US, on a fellowship at Cornell University and thence joined the faculty there as a physics professor in 1951 without a PhD. In 1953, he took up a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In 1957, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Dyson is best known for demonstrating in 1949 the equivalence of the formulations of quantum electrodynamics that existed by that time – Richard Feynman's diagrams, on the one hand, and, on the other, the operator method developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Dyson was the first person (besides Feynman) to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams, and his 1949 paper (written in 1948) was the first paper using them. He said in that paper that Feynman diagrams were not just a computational tool, but a physical theory. He developed rules for the diagrams that completely solved the renormalization problem. Dyson's paper and also his lectures presented Feynman's theories of QED (quantum electrodynamics) in a form that other physicists could understand and undoubtedly facilitated the physics community's acceptance of Feynman's work. Robert Oppenheimer, in particular, was persuaded by Dyson that Feynman's new theory was as valid as Schwinger's and Tomonaga's. Oppenheimer rewarded Dyson with a lifetime appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study, "for proving me wrong," Oppenheimer said.

The same year, in related work, Dyson invented the Dyson series. It was this Dyson paper that inspired John Ward to derive his celebrated ''Ward identity.''

Dyson also did work in a variety of topics in mathematics, such as topology, analysis, number theory and random matrices. There is an interesting story involving random matrices. In 1973 the number theorist Hugh Montgomery was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and had just made his pair correlation conjecture concerning the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. He showed his formula to the mathematician Atle Selberg who said it looked like something in mathematical physics and he should show it to Dyson, which he did. Dyson recognized the formula as the pair correlation function of the Gaussian unitary ensemble, which has been extensively studied by physicists. This suggested that there might be an unexpected connection between the distribution of primes 2,3,5,7,11,... and the energy levels in the nuclei of heavy elements such as uranium.

From 1957 to 1961 he worked on the Orion Project, which proposed the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion. A prototype was demonstrated using conventional explosives, but a treaty, which he was involved in and supported, banned the testing of nuclear weapons other than underground, and this caused the project to be abandoned.

In 1958 he led the design team for the TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used throughout the world in hospitals and universities for the production of isotopes.

A seminal work by Dyson came in 1966 when, together with Andrew Lenard and independently of Elliott H. Lieb and Walter Thirring, he proved rigorously that the exclusion principle plays the main role in the stability of bulk matter. Hence, it is not the electromagnetic repulsion between electrons and nuclei that is responsible for two wood blocks that are left on top of each other not coalescing into a single piece, but rather it is the exclusion principle applied to electrons and protons that generates the classical macroscopic normal force. In condensed matter physics, Dyson also did studies in the phase transition of the Ising model in 1 dimension and spin waves.

Around 1979, Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under the direction of Alvin Weinberg, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a strong biology group. He is not an unqualified believer in the predictions being made by the believers in global warming (see below). Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.

He retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1994. In 1998, Dyson joined the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund. , Dyson is the president of the Space Studies Institute, the space research organization founded by Gerard K. O'Neill. Dyson is a long-time member of the JASON defense advisory group.

Dyson is a regular contributor to the ''New York Review of Books''.

Honors and awards [link]

In 1952 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Dyson was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1966, Max Planck medal in 1969 and the Harvey Prize in 1977.

In 1977, Dyson supervised Princeton undergraduate John Aristotle Phillips in a term paper that outlined a credible design for a nuclear weapon. This earned Phillips the nickname ''The A-Bomb Kid''.

In the 1984–85 academic year he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen, which resulted in the book ''Infinite In All Directions''.

In 1989, Dyson taught at Duke University as a Fritz London Memorial Lecturer. In the same year, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Dyson has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future. In 1996 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.

In 1993, Dyson was given the Enrico Fermi Award.

In 2000, Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

In 2003, Dyson was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.

Concepts [link]

Biotechnology and genetic engineering [link]

Dyson cheerfully admits his record as a prophet is mixed, but "it is better to be wrong than to be vague."

"To answer the world's material needs, technology has to be not only beautiful but also cheap."

Dyson sphere [link]

In 1960 Dyson wrote a short paper for the journal ''Science'', entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". In it, he theorized that a technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization might completely surround its native star with artificial structures in order to maximize the capture of the star's available energy. Eventually, the civilization would completely enclose the star, intercepting electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from visible light downwards and radiating waste heat outwards as infrared radiation. Therefore, one method of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations would be to look for large objects radiating in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Dyson conceived that such structures would be clouds of asteroid-sized space habitats, though science fiction writers have preferred a solid structure: either way, such an artifact is often referred to as a Dyson sphere, although Dyson himself used the term "shell". Dyson says that he used the term "artificial biosphere" in the article meaning a habitat, not a shape. The general concept of such an energy-transferring shell had been advanced decades earlier by author Olaf Stapledon in his 1937 novel ''Star Maker'', a source that Dyson has credited publicly.

Dyson tree [link]

Dyson has also proposed the creation of a ''Dyson tree'', a genetically-engineered plant capable of growing on a comet. He suggested that comets could be engineered to contain hollow spaces filled with a breathable atmosphere, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system.

Space colonies [link]

Dyson has been interested in space travel since he was a child, reading such science fiction classics as Olaf Stapledon's ''Star Maker''. As a young man, he worked for General Atomics on the nuclear-powered Orion spacecraft. He hoped Project Orion would put men on Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970. He's been unhappy for a quarter-century on how the government conducts space travel:

He still hopes for cheap space travel, but is resigned to waiting for private entrepreneurs to develop something new—and cheap.

Dyson also has proposed the use of bioengineered space colonies to colonize the Kuiper Belt on the outer edge of our Solar System. He proposed that habitats could be grown from space hardened spores. The colonies could then be warmed by large reflector plant leaves that could focus the dim, distant sunlight back on the growing colony. This was illustrated by Pat Rawlings on the cover of the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine.

Space exploration [link]

Dyson's transform [link]

Dyson also has some credits in pure mathematics. His concept "Dyson's transform" led to one of the most important lemmas of Olivier Ramaré's theorem that every even integer can be written as a sum of no more than six primes.

Dyson series [link]

The Dyson series, the formal solution of an explicitly time-dependent Schrödinger equation by iteration, and the corresponding Dyson time-ordering operator

\mathcal T\,,

an entity of basic importance in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, are also named after Dyson.

Views [link]

Metaphysics [link]

Dyson has suggested a kind of cosmic metaphysics of mind. In his book ''Infinite in All Directions'' he is writing about three levels of mind: "The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is the level of elementary physical processes in quantum mechanics. Matter in quantum mechanics is [...] constantly making choices between alternative possibilities according to probabilistic laws. [...] The second level at which we detect the operations of mind is the level of direct human experience. [...] [I]t is reasonable to believe in the existence of a third level of mind, a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component and call it God, then we can say that we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus" (p. 297).

Global warming [link]

Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written that "[o]ne of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas." However, he has pointed out that existing simulation models of climate fail to account for some important factors, and hence the results will contain too much error to reliably predict future trends:

He is among signatories of a letter to the UN criticizing the IPCC and has also argued against the ostracization of scientists whose views depart from the acknowledged mainstream of scientific opinion on climate change, stating that "heretics" have historically been an important force in driving scientific progress. "[H]eretics who question the dogmas are needed... I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies."

More recently, he has endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to recent "measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science."

He has, however, argued that political efforts to reduce the causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority: }}

Since originally taking interest in climate studies in the 1970s, Dyson has suggested that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be controlled by planting fast-growing trees. He calculates that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere.

Dyson is well-aware that his "heresy" on global warming has been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."

"To reach reasonable solutions of the problems [of global warming], all opinions must be heard and all participants must be treated with respect."

Nuclear winter [link]

From his 1988 book ''Infinite in All Directions'', he offered some criticism of then current models predicting a devastating nuclear winter in the event of a large-scale nuclear war: }}

Warfare and weapons [link]

On hearing the news of the bombing of Hiroshima:

Freeman Dyson, in his capacity as a military adviser, may have prevented the US from using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war. When a general said in a meeting "We should throw in a nuke once in a while to keep the other side guessing," Dyson became alarmed and obtained permission to write an objective report discussing the pros and cons of using such weapons from a purely military point of view. His report, declassified from SECRET in 2002, was sufficiently objective that both sides in the debate based their arguments on the report. Dyson says that the report showed that even from a narrow military point of view the US was better off not using nuclear weapons. Dyson stated on the Dick Cavett show that the use of nuclear weaponry was a bad idea for the US at the time because "our targets were big and theirs were small."

At the British Bomber Command, Dyson and colleagues proposed ripping out two gun turrets from the RAF Lancaster bombers, to cut the catastrophic losses to German fighters in the Battle of Berlin. A Lancaster without turrets could fly faster and be much more maneuverable.

Dyson opposed the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the invasion of Iraq. He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 US presidential election and ''The New York Times'' has described him as a political liberal.

The role of failure [link]

On English academics [link]

Science and religion [link]

Dyson strongly opposes reductionism. He is a non-denominational Christian and has attended various churches from Presbyterian to Roman Catholic. Regarding doctrinal or Christological issues, he has said "I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology."

Dyson disagrees with the famous remark by his fellow physicist Steven Weinberg that "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."

On Wikipedia [link]

Dyson on Wikipedia:

Works [link]

''Symmetry Groups in Nuclear and Particle Physics'', 1966 (Academic-oriented text)

''Interstellar Transport'', 1968

''Disturbing the Universe'', 1979, ISBN 0060111089. Review

''Weapons and Hope'', 1984 (Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). Review

''Origins of Life'', 1986. Second edition, 1999. Review

''Infinite in All Directions'', 1988, ISBN 014014482X. Review

''From Eros to Gaia'', 1992

''Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson'', 1996

''Imagined Worlds'', Harvard University Press 1997, ISBN 978-0-674-53908-2. Review

''The Sun, the Genome and the Internet'', 1999. Review

''L'mportanza di essere imprevedibile'', Di Renzo Editore, 2003

''The Scientist as Rebel'', 2006. Review

''Advanced Quantum Mechanics'', World Scientific, 2007, ISBN 978-981-270-661-4. Freely available at: arXiv:quant-ph/0608140. (Dyson's 1951 Cornell lecture notes transcribed by David Derbes)

''A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe'', University of Virginia Press, 2007. Review

References [link]

External links [link]

By Dyson [link]

Freeman J. Dyson's homepage

"The Question of Global Warming", by Freeman Dyson, June 12, 2008

:*Comments on "The Question of Global Warming", with a reply by Dyson, September 25, 2008

"Our Biotech Future", essay by Freeman Dyson, July 19, 2007

:*Comments on "Our Biotech Future", with a reply by Dyson,September 27, 2007 :*Another comment on "Our Biotech Future", with a reply by Dyson, October 11, 2007

"In Praise of Open Thinking", audio from a panel discussion with his son George Dyson, recorded 07-29-2004

TED Talks: Freeman Dyson says: let's look for life in the outer solar system at TED in 2003 (video)

Templeton Prize acceptance lecture 2000, by Freeman Dyson

''Imagined Worlds'' by Freeman Dyson, 1996: Chapter 1

Video Interview of Freeman Dyson discussing Bogus Climate Models

Freeman Dyson tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)

A radio interview with Freeman Dyson Aired on the Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show in 2009.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia, published March 1967 (declassified December 2002)

TVO Big Ideas: Freeman Dyson on Living Through Four Revolutions, by Freeman Dyson (video) June 1, 2011 at Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada

About Dyson [link]

"The Civil Heretic ", profile at the ''New York Times Magazine'' by Nicholas Dawidoff, March 25, 2009

:*Interview, June 4, 2009, Dyson comments on the misleading overemphasis of his climate-change views in the NYT profile. , biography, circa 2000

Dyson biographical outline, circa 2005

Dyson author page and archive, from ''The New York Review of Books''

"The Scientist as Rebel", 2005 interview at ''Wild River Review''

NPR interview of Freeman Dyson, audio, ''All Things Considered'', November 2, 2004

Google video: interviewer: Robert Wright, video, 44:55, June 30, 2001

Freeman Dyson wins $1m religion prize, 9 May 2000

"Freeman Dyson's Brain", interview by Stewart Brand at ''Wired'', 1998

Oral History interview transcript with Freeman J. Dyson 17 December 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives

"Disturbing the Universe": BBC interview with Freeman Dyson, audio, 18 January 1980

To Mars by A-bomb. BBC Airdate 8 February 2006.

Category:1923 births Category:Living people Category:People from Winchester Category:Old Wykehamists Category:English mathematicians Category:English physicists Category:English nuclear physicists Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:American mathematicians Category:American physicists Category:American nuclear physicists Category:Wolf Prize in Physics laureates Category:Enrico Fermi Award recipients Category:Institute for Advanced Study faculty Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:Space advocates Category:Futurologists Category:Templeton Prize laureates Category:American Christians Category:English Christians Category:Cornell University alumni Category:Duke University faculty Category:English emigrants to the United States Category:Memoirists Category:Philosophy writers Category:Science writers Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:American anti–nuclear weapons activists Category:British anti–nuclear weapons activists Freeman Dyson Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Gifford Lecturers Category:Theoretical physicists

ar:فريمان ديسون bn:ফ্রীম্যান জন ডাইসন bg:Фриймън Дайсън ca:Freeman J. Dyson cs:Freeman Dyson da:Freeman Dyson de:Freeman Dyson es:Freeman Dyson eu:Freeman Dyson fa:فریمن دایسون fr:Freeman Dyson gl:Freeman Dyson ko:프리먼 다이슨 it:Freeman Dyson he:פרימן דייסון ht:Freeman Dyson hu:Freeman Dyson nl:Freeman Dyson ja:フリーマン・ダイソン no:Freeman Dyson pl:Freeman Dyson pt:Freeman Dyson ro:Freeman J. Dyson ru:Дайсон, Фримен sk:Freeman Dyson sl:Freeman John Dyson fi:Freeman Dyson tg:Фриман Дайсон tr:Freeman Dyson uk:Фрімен Дайсон zh:弗里曼·戴森

This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.

Freeman Dyson page: http://wn.com/Freeman_Dyson

name	Bre Pettis
birth date	March 04, 2011
education	The Evergreen State College, Pacific Oaks College
known for	co-founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries }}