Rolf Landauer
| Rolf William Landauer | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 4, 1927 Stuttgart, Germany |
| Died | April 28, 1999 (aged 72) Briarcliff Manor, New York, U.S. |
| Residence | U.S. |
| Nationality | German American |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions |
NASA IBM |
| Alma mater |
Stuyvesant High School Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Léon Brillouin and Wendell Furry |
| Doctoral students | None |
| Known for | Landauer's principle, Landauer formula (in quantum transport) |
| Notable awards |
Stuart Ballantine Medal (1992) Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1995) Edison Medal (1998) |
Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 28, 1999) was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. In 1961 he discovered Landauer's principle, that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing. He also is responsible for the Landauer formula relating the electrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties. He won the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and the IEEE Edison Medal, among many other honors.
Landauer was born on February 4, 1927, in Stuttgart, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews, graduated in 1943 from Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City's mathematics and science magnet schools, and obtained his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1945. Following service in the US Navy as an Electrician's Mate, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950.
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