29 Facts About Frank Wilczek

Frank Anthony Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate.

Frank Wilczek is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Founding Director of T D Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, distinguished professor at Arizona State University and full professor at Stockholm University.

Frank Wilczek's grandparents were immigrants, who "really did work with their hands", according to Wilczek, but Frank's father took night school classes to educate himself, working as a repairman to support his family.

Frank Wilczek's father became a "self-taught engineer", whose interests in technology and science inspired his son.

Frank Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School.

Frank Wilczek was particularly inspired by two of his high school physics teachers, one of whom taught a course that helped students with the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

Frank Wilczek was a finalist in 1967 and ultimately won fourth place, based on a mathematical project involving group theory.

Frank Wilczek received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and membership in Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Chicago in 1970.

Frank Wilczek earned a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1972 and a Ph.

Frank Wilczek met Betsy Devine at Princeton, when both watched the televised 1972 Fisher-Spassky chess matches.

Frank Wilczek was raised Catholic but later "lost faith in conventional religion" although he told Scientific American that religion "had meant a lot to me as a teenager".

Frank Wilczek has been described as an agnostic but tweeted in 2013 that "pantheist" is "closer to the mark".

Frank Wilczek is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute, an organization that works to mitigate existential risks facing humanity, particularly existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.

Frank Wilczek is a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organization which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

Frank Wilczek is a co-founding member of the Kosciuszko Foundation of the Collegium of Eminent Scientists of Polish Origin and Ancestry.

Frank Wilczek was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2005.

Frank Wilczek became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.

Frank Wilczek won the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society in 2003.

Frank Wilczek was the co-recipient of the 2003 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society.

Frank Wilczek was the co-recipient of the 2005 King Faisal International Prize for Science.

On January 25,2013, Frank Wilczek received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Frank Wilczek served on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2009 to 2011.

In 2011, Frank Wilczek gave the George Gamow Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Frank Wilczek holds the Herman Feshbach Professorship of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

Frank Wilczek has worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was a visiting professor at NORDITA.

Frank Wilczek has worked on condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and particle physics.

In 1973, while a graduate student working with David Gross at Princeton University, Frank Wilczek discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction between them; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles.

Frank Wilczek named this new hypothetical particle the "axion" after a brand of laundry detergent, while Weinberg called it "Higglet".

When Daniel Tsui and Horst Stormer discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982, Bertrand Halperin expanded the math Frank Wilczek proposed in 1982 for fractional statistics in two dimensions to help explain it.