Gerald E. Brown1926—2013

Life and work

Brown received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1946 from the University of Wisconsin and in 1948 his master's degree from Yale University, where in 1950 he earned his PhD (under Gregory Breit). In 1957 he earned his D.Sc. from the University of Birmingham in England (under Rudolf Peierls), where he was from 1955 docent and in 1959/60 was professor for theoretical physics. From 1960 to 1985 he was a professor at NORDITA in Copenhagen and concurrently from 1964 to 1968 Professor at Princeton and since 1968 he was a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he became Distinguished Professor of Physics in 1988.

Brown worked first in theoretical atomic physics (self-ionization of the vacuum with Geoff Ravenhall in 1951, Lamb shift in heavy atoms, electron-electron interactions, precise calculation of Rayleigh scattering). In nuclear physics, where he was for decades one of the leading theorists of nuclear many body problems in particle physics, he worked, for example, with Mark Bolsteri on the giant dipole resonance, with Tom Kuo on effective interactions of nucleons in atomic nuclei, as well on chiral invariant theories of the atomic nucleus (with Mannque Rho and Dan-Olof Riska), that is to say, field theories with pions and other mesons. Starting in the 1970s he worked frequently in collaboration with Hans Bethe on the nuclear-physics-derived equations of state in the theory of compact stars (gravitational collapse, supernovae, double stars with compact stars as partners, development of black holes, gamma ray bursts). Since the end of the 1970s, Brown worked on bag models of nucleons (Chiral bag model). In the 1980s he also worked together with K. Bedell on Fermi liquid theory. Toward the end of Bethe's life, Bethe told Brown to explain his work to the rest of the world.

Awards and recognition

Brown received an honorary doctorate from the universities of Helsinki (1982), Birmingham (1990) and Copenhagen (1998).

• Fellow of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
• Fellow of the American Physical Society
• 1966 Silver Medal of the University of Helsinki
• 1974 Haederspris of the Niels Bohr Institute
• 1975 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1976 Boris Pregel Award of the New York Academy of Sciences
• 1978 Academician of the National Academy of Sciences
• 1982 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society
• 1992 John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute
• 1996 Max Planck Medal of the Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft
• 2001 Hans A. Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society

Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.