Geoffrey Chew
| Geoffrey F. Chew | |
|---|---|
Chew at his California home on July 2014
|
|
| Born |
June 5, 1924 Washington, D.C., United States |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | UC Berkeley |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Doctoral advisor | Enrico Fermi |
| Doctoral students |
David Gross John H. Schwarz John R. Taylor |
| Known for | S matrix, bootstrap theory, strong interactions |
| Notable awards |
Hughes Prize (1962) Lawrence Prize (1969) Majorana Prize (2008) |
Geoffrey Foucar Chew (/tʃuː/; born June 5, 1924) is an American theoretical physicist.
He is known for his bootstrap theory of strong interactions. He has worked as a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley since 1957 and has been an emeritus since 1991. Chew holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics (1944–1946) from the University of Chicago. Between 1950 and 1956, he was a physics faculty member at the University of Illinois. In addition, Chew was a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Chew was a student of Enrico Fermi. His students include David Gross, one of the winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and John H. Schwarz, one of the pioneers of string theory.
Chew was known as a leader of the S-matrix approach to the strong interaction and the associated bootstrap principle, a theory whose popularity peaked in the 1960s when he led an influential theory group at the University of California, Berkeley. S-matrix theorists sought to understand the strong interaction by using the analytic properties of the scattering matrix to calculate the interactions of bound-states without assuming that there is a point-particle field theory underneath. The S-matrix approach did not provide a local space-time description. Although it was not immediately appreciated by the practitioners, it was a natural framework in which to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
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