Roman Jackiw

Roman Wladimir Jackiw was an American theoretical physicist and a Dirac Medallist. He was born on November 8, 1939, and passed away on June 14, 2023. Jackiw made important contributions to the field of physics during his lifetime, earning recognition for his work. His achievements helped advance our understanding of the world around us.

Early life and education

Roman Jackiw was born in Lubliniec, Poland, in 1939. He grew up in a Ukrainian family that moved to Austria and Germany before finally settling in New York City when he was about 10 years old.

Jackiw completed his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College and earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1966, studying under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson. He became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Theoretical Physics in 1969 and stayed there until he retired, remaining connected in emeritus status in 2019.

Career

Roman Jackiw helped discover something called the chiral anomaly, also known as the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly. In 1969, he and John Stewart Bell explained why a neutral pion can break apart into two photons. This seems impossible in classical electrodynamics, but Jackiw and Bell showed that at the quantum level, this rule does not always hold. Their work supported the idea of how quarks, tiny particles, behave.

Jackiw is also famous for Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity, or JT Gravity. This is a simple theory of gravity that uses one dimension of space and one of time, and it includes something called a dilaton field. It helps scientists study black holes.

Personal life

Roman Jackiw married fellow physicist So-Young Pi, who is the daughter of Korean writer Pi Chun-deuk. He had two sons: Stefan Jackiw, an American violinist, and Nicholas Jackiw, a software designer known for creating The Geometer's Sketchpad. He also had a daughter named Simone Ahlborn, who works as an educator at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island.

Jackiw passed away on June 14, 2023, at the age of 83.

Awards

Roman Jackiw received several important awards for his work. In 1995, he was given the Heineman Prize. Later, on May 26, 2000, he received a special honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden.