Kenneth Nordtvedt

Dr. Kenneth Leon Nordtvedt is a professor emeritus in the Physics Department at Montana State University and a senior researcher specializing in relativistic theories of gravity. He was born on April 16, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois. Nordtvedt graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960) and Stanford University (Ph.D., 1964). In the mid-1960s he showed through "a fiendish piece of mathematics" how lunar laser ranging could be used to test a cornerstone of general relativity known as the equivalence principle. He was a board member and scientific advisor overseeing the joint NASA-ESA Space Test of Equivalence Principle mission. He was appointed by then President Ronald Reagan to the National Science Board. He was one of only two academic scientists serving on the board. He served three terms in the Montana state legislature for a six year period in the early eighties. He had support from NASA during the 1970s for his research. His research was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article featured on the front page.^[1]

He is also an active genetic genealogist, and has also done his own research into genetic haplogroups, particularly the Y DNA group I to which he belongs,^[2] and advises on haplotypes for a population genetics group at FamilyTreeDNA. Nordtvedt has proposed a new most recent common ancestor calculation method.^[3]

References

1. ^ The National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program
2. ^ Кен Нордведт. Свыше 20,000 лет истории гаплогруппы I1b1 (P37.2+) Вадим Веренич The Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy (Русская версия), Vol 1, No 1 (2009).
3. ^ More Realistic TMRCA Calculations Ken Nordtvedt Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall, 2008, pp. 96-103.

Associated eponyms

• Nordtvedt effect

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