- Louis Witten
Louis Witten is an American theoretical physicist and the father of
Edward Witten .Witten's research has centered around classical
gravitation , including the discovery of certain exactelectrovacuum solution s to theEinstein field equation . He edited an important review (see citation below) which contains papers by leading contributors such as ADM (Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner), Choquet-Bruhat, Ehlers and Kundt, Goldberg, and Pirani which remain valuable to researchers after the passage of more than 40 years.Louis Witten was born to a
Jewish family inBaltimore , Maryland, on April 13, 1921. His parents, Abraham Witten and Bessie Perman, emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe as teenagers in 1909 and were married in 1916. Witten graduated as aCivil Engineer fromThe Johns Hopkins University in 1941. From 1942 to 1946 he served in theUS Army Air Forces as a Radar Weather Officer.He was a graduate student in physics at The Johns Hopkins University from 1948 to 1951 when he received the PhD degree. His dissertation, in statistical mechanics, was entitled "A Model of an Imperfect Gas". His thesis advisor was
Theodore H. Berlin . In 1949 he married Lorraine Wollach of Baltimore. They had four children, Edward, Celia, Matthew, and Jesse. Lorraine died in 1987. In 1992 he married Francis Lydia DeLange.After postdoctoral study at
Princeton University , the University of Maryland, and theLincoln Laboratory of MIT, Witten joined RIAS, the research laboratory of theMartin-Marietta Corporation . In 1968 he became a Professor of Physics at theUniversity of Cincinnati where he remained until his retirement in 1991. Since 1968 he has been a Vice-President and Director of Science Affairs of theGravity Research Foundation .References
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