Joel Lebowitz

Joel Lebowitz is a mathematical physicist born in 1930 in what was then Czechoslovakia, now Ukraine, and the George William Hill Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Rutgers University. His work concerns statistical mechanics, the mathematical study of how the motion of enormous numbers of particles produces the large-scale behaviour of matter. With Elliott Lieb he proved that Coulomb interactions obey the thermodynamic limit, and he established the inequalities that now carry his name for the ferromagnetic Ising model. After surviving deportation to Auschwitz as a boy, he emigrated to the United States, studied at Brooklyn College and took his doctorate at Syracuse University in 1956 under Peter G. Bergmann. He worked with Lars Onsager at Yale, taught at Stevens Institute of Technology and Yeshiva University, and moved to Rutgers in 1977. He founded the Journal of Statistical Physics in 1975 and edited it until 2018, and his honours include the Boltzmann Medal, the Henri Poincaré Prize, the Max Planck Medal and a fellowship of the American Mathematical Society.