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Anthony Zee
Born	1945[1] Kunming,Republic of China
Alma mater	Princeton University Harvard University
Awards	Sloan Research Fellowship Humboldt Research Award Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical Physics
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara
Doctoral advisor	Sidney Coleman
Doctoral students	Stephen Barr David Wolpert

Anthony Zee (Chinese:徐一鴻, born 1945) (Zee comes from /ʑi²³/, theShanghainese pronunciation of徐) is aChinese-Americanphysicist, writer, and a professor at theKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara.

Zee was born in Kunming, China, in 1945, but his family fled to Hong Kong when he was four years old.^[2][3] His father was a self-taught businessman, and after a few years in Hong Kong, during a slump in business, decided to move the family again, this time to Brazil.^[2] The family settled in São Paulo, where Zee attended an American international high school before immigrating to the US in 1962 to attendPrinceton University, where he worked with physicistJohn Archibald Wheeler.^[2][4] After graduating from Princeton, Zee obtained his PhD fromHarvard University, where he focused ongroup theory in physics, supervised bySidney Coleman.^[2] He graduated in 1970 and went on to complete a postdoc at theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[2] He would later return to the institute in 1977 and 1978 during a sabbatical year while on faculty at Princeton.^[2]

After completing his postdoctoral studies, Zee accepted an assistant professorship at Rockefeller University in New York in 1972. He only stayed a year before returning to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1973.^[2] In his first year back at Princeton, Zee hadEd Witten as his teaching assistant and grader. In 1978 Zee moved on to the University of Pennsylvania for two years.^[2] From there he went to the University of Washington before settling at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1985.^[5] At UCSB, Zee teaches courses on bothgeneral relativity andquantum field theory.^[6] The culmination of his teaching is his highly regarded and widely praised "trilogy" of graduate level textbooks:Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell,Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell, andGroup Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. He is also the author of several books for general readers about physics and Chinese culture.

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Zee specializes in theoretical physics; research interests include high energy physics, field theory, cosmology, biophysics, condensed matter physics, and mathematical physics.^[7] He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books onparticle physics,condensed matter physics,anomalies in physics,random matrix theory,superconductivity, thequantum Hall effect, and other topics intheoretical physics andevolutionary biology, as well as their various interrelations.^{[citation needed]}

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In winter 2001, Johns Hopkins University Press published an article by Zee titled "On Fat Deposits around the Mammary Glands in the Females of Homo Sapiens" in theNew Literary History.^[7] Zee describes the female breasts and reproductive system under anevolutionary psychology lens with quotes such as "The reproductive value of a woman at a given time is her fertility integrated from that time until the end of her reproductive life. While fertility typically peaks in the mid-twenties, reproductive value peaks in the teens." and "Like the mammary glands in the male, the female orgasm does not appear to serve any useful biological function. In most primates, female orgasm is either absent or inconspicuous".^[8] This article was published afterRalph Louis Cohen invited Zee to write an article of his choice in the literary magazine.^[8]

Technical:

• 1982.Unity of Forces in the Universe. Singapore:World Scientific.
• 2010.Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. 2nd ed.Princeton University Press.ISBN 978-0691140346^[9]
• 2013.Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell. Princeton University Press.ISBN 978-0691145587
• 2016.Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. Princeton University Press.ISBN 978-0691162690
• 2020.Fly by Night Physics: How Physicists Use the Backs of Envelopes. Princeton University Press. 2020.ISBN 978-0-691-18254-4.

General readers:

• 1989.An Old Man's Toy,Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-02-633440-2
• 1990.Swallowing Clouds,University of Washington Press.ISBN 978-0-671-74724-4
• 2007.Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. Foreword byRoger Penrose.ISBN 978-0-691-00946-9. 1986 1st ed. published by Macmillan; 2016 paperback edition published by Princeton University PressISBN 978-0-691-17326-9^[10]
• 2018.On Gravity: A Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject. Princeton University Press. 2018.ISBN 978-0-691-17438-9.
• 2023.Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible. Princeton University Press. 2023.ISBN 978-0-691-17429-7.
• 2025.Top Ten Ideas of Physics: Foundations for Understanding the Universe. Princeton University Press. 2025.ISBN 978-0-691-22580-7

• Institute for Advanced Study Dyson Distinguished Visiting Professor^[11]
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship – 1973^[12]
• Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship – 2006-2007^[13]
• Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation Humboldt Research Award – 2011^[11]
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – 2014^[14]
• Fellow of American Physical Society (APS) - 2014^[15]

Wikiquote has quotations related toAnthony Zee.

• Interview of Anthony Zee by David Zierler on 2020 December 15,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA
• Anthony Zee's Personal Web Page
• Anthony Zee on Google Scholar
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 1 of 4".YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013. (lectures given in 2004)
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 2 of 4".YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 3 of 4".YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 4 of 4".YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "A Brief Introduction to General Relativity - with Anthony Zee".YouTube. The Royal Institution. 27 August 2020.Archived from the original on 21 December 2021.
• Zee, Anthony (14 October 2020)."Quantum Theory in a Nutshell".YouTube. CUPS - Cambridge University Physics Society.Archived from the original on 21 December 2021.

• Living people
• Harvard University alumni
• University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
• 21st-century American physicists
• American particle physicists
• 1945 births
• Princeton University alumni
• Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
• American people of Chinese descent
• People from Kunming
• Scientists from Yunnan
• Sloan Research Fellows
• Fellows of the American Physical Society
• American scientists of Asian descent

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