Rolf William Landauer | |
|---|---|
 Landauer in September 1969 | |
| Born | (1927-02-04)February 4, 1927 |
| Died | April 27, 1999(1999-04-27) (aged 72)[1] |
| Alma mater | Stuyvesant High School Harvard University |
| Known for | Landauer's principle Landauer formula |
| Awards | Stuart Ballantine Medal(1992) Oliver E. Buckley Prize(1995) Edison Medal(1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | NASA IBM |
| Thesis | Phase Integral Approximations in Wave Mechanics: I. Reflections in One-Dimensional Wave Mechanics. II. Phase Integral Approximations in Two and Three Dimensions. (1950) |
| Doctoral advisor | Léon Brillouin Wendell Furry |
Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 27, 1999) was aGerman-Americanphysicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of thethermodynamics of information processing,condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media.[2] Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, obtained a Ph.D. in physics fromHarvard in 1950, and then spent most of his career atIBM.
In 1961 he discoveredLandauer's principle, that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulatesinformation, such as erasing a bit of memory,entropy increases and an associated amount ofenergy is dissipated asheat.[2] This principle is relevant toreversible computing,quantum information andquantum computing. He also is responsible for theLandauer formula relating theelectrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties. He won theStuart Ballantine Medal of theFranklin Institute, theOliver Buckley Prize of theAmerican Physical Society and theIEEE Edison Medal, among many other honors.[2]
Landauer was born on February 4, 1927, inStuttgart,Germany. Heemigrated to the United States in 1938 to escapeNazi persecution ofJews,graduated in 1943 fromStuyvesant High School, one ofNew York City's mathematics and sciencemagnet schools, and obtained his undergraduate degree fromHarvard in 1945. Following service in theUS Navy as anElectrician's Mate, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950.[1] His advisor was initiallyLéon Brillouin but he finished the thesis under the supervision ofWendell H. Furry.[2]
He first worked for two years atNASA, then known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, at itsGlenn Research Center, then known as the Lewis Research Center, in Cleveland. At the age of 25, he began a career in semiconductors atIBM Research. As part of the two-man team responsible for managing IBM's Research Division in the mid-1960s, he was involved in a number of programs, including the company's work on semiconductor lasers. In 1969, he was appointed anIBM Fellow.
Much of his research after 1969 related to the kinetics of small structures. He showed that in systems with two or more competing states of local stability, their likelihood depends on noise all along the path connecting them. In electron transport theory, he is particularly associated with the idea, taken from circuit theory, that electric flow can be considered a consequence of current sources as well as applied fields. He was also a pioneer in the area of information handling. His principles have been applied to computers and to the measurement process and are the basis for Landauer's own demonstration that communication, in principle, can be accomplished with arbitrarily little dissipation of energy.[3]
Rolf William Landauer died on 27 April 1999 at his home inBriarcliff Manor from brain cancer.[1][4]
The range of his work has been recognized in special issues of two journals, 10 years apart: theIBM Journal of Research and Development (January 1988) andSuperlattices and Microstructures (March/April 1998).
Rolf W. Landauer, who helped solidify the slippery concept of information and bring it firmly into the mainstream of physics, died on Tuesday at his home in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. He was 72.
