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Sir Samuel Frederick Edwards

Samuel Frederick Edwards
SamEdwardsBetter.jpg
Born (1928-02-01)1 February 1928
Swansea
Died 7 May 2015(2015-05-07) (aged 87)
Cambridge, England
Nationality British
Fields physics
Institutions University of Cambridge
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Harvard University
Doctoral advisor Julian Schwinger
Doctoral students Elliott H. Lieb
Monica Olvera de la Cruz
Michael Cates
Nigel Goldenfeld
Known for path integral formulation
polymer physics
spin glass
granular material
Notable awards Maxwell Medal and Prize (1974)
Davy Medal (1984)
Boltzmann medal (1995)
Royal Medal (2001)
Dirac Medal (2005)

Sir Samuel Frederick Edwards FLSW FRS (1 February 1928 – 7 May 2015), "universally known as 'Sam'," was a Welsh physicist.

Sir Samuel was born on 1 February 1928 in Swansea, the son of Richard and Mary Jane Edwards.

He was educated at the Bishop Gore School in Swansea, and Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester in Britain, and at Harvard University, in the United States. He wrote his thesis under Julian Schwinger on the structure of the electron, and subsequently developed the functional integral form of field theory.

Edwards' work in condensed matter physics started in 1958 with a paper which showed that statistical properties of disordered systems (glasses, gels etc.) could be described by the Feynman diagram and path integral methods invented in quantum field theory. During the following 35 years Edwards worked in the theoretical study of complex materials, such as polymers, gels, colloids and similar systems. His seminal paper came in 1965 which "in one stroke founded the modern quantitative understanding of polymer matter."Pierre-Gilles de Gennes notably extended Edwards' 1965 seminal work, ultimately leading to de Gennes' 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Doi-Edwards theory of polymer melt viscoelasticity originated from an initial publication of Edwards in 1967, was expanded upon by de Gennes in 1971, and was subsequently formalized through a series of publications between Edwards and Masao Doi in the late 1970s.


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