Norman Christ
| Norman Christ | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 22, 1943 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions |
Columbia University Princeton University |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Doctoral advisor | Tsung-Dao Lee |
| Doctoral students |
Emanuel Derman Yuefan Deng Adrian Kaehler |
| Notable awards |
Sloan Fellowship (1967) Gordon Bell Prize (1998) |
Norman Howard Christ (/ˈkrɪst/; born 22 December 1943 in Pittsburgh) is a physicist and a professor at Columbia University, where he holds the Ephraim Gildor Professorship of Computational Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his research in Lattice QCD.
Norman Christ graduated Salutatorian with a B.A. in physics from Columbia in 1965 and received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1966 under Nobel Laureate Tsung-Dao Lee. Christ became a professor at Columbia after graduation, and has remained there since. He is also a leading researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Norman's research lies in the fields of Lattice QCD, which simulates strong interaction among quarks and gluons with monte carlo method. He worked on various topic in this field, such as the phenomena of quark confinement, the spontaneous chiral magnetization of the vacuum and the quark-gluon plasma. In recent years, he is mostly interested in the Kaon physics, such as the kaon mass difference, the rare kaon decay and most importantly the direct and indirect CP violation parameter.
Lattice QCD is extremely computational intensive. The simulation is usually performed on the state-of-the-art supercomputer. Instead of purchasing commercial machines, Norman chose to build supercomputers with his colleges at Columbia University. The lattice group at Columbia pioneered the construction of highly parallel machines dedicated to QCD calculations in 1982, and produced a series of three successful machines between 1985 and 1989 which were used to obtain a variety of new results in QCD. During this period there were also a number of other dedicated computer projects with similar goals carried out in Italy (the APE Project), Japan (QCD-PAX), and Fermilab (ACP-MAPS) and IBM (GF11) in the U. S.
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