David Hestenes
| David Orlin Hestenes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 21, 1933 (age 83) Chicago |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Arizona State University |
| Known for | Geometric Algebra |
| Notable awards | Oersted Medal (2002) |
David Orlin Hestenes, Ph.D. (born May 21, 1933) is a theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.
For more than 30 years, he was employed in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Arizona State University (ASU), where he retired with the rank of Research Professor and is now emeritus.
David Orlin Hestenes (eldest son of mathematician Magnus Hestenes) was born 1933 in Chicago Illinois. Beginning college as a pre-medical major at UCLA from 1950 to 1952, he graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 1954 with degrees in philosophy and speech. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, he entered UCLA as an unclassified graduate student, completed a physics M.A. in 1958 and won a University Fellowship. His mentor at UCLA was the physicist Robert Finkelstein, who was working on unified field theories at that time. A serendipitous encounter with lecture notes by mathematician Marcel Riesz inspired Hestenes to study a geometric interpretation of Dirac matrices. He obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA with a thesis entitled Geometric Calculus and Elementary Particles. Shortly thereafter he recognized that the Dirac algebras and Pauli matrices could be unified in matrix-free form by a device later called a spacetime split. Then he revised his thesis and published it in 1966 as a book, Space Time Algebra, now referred to as spacetime algebra (STA). This was the first major step in developing a unified, coordinate-free geometric algebra and calculus for all of physics.
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