72 Facts About Freeman Dyson

Freeman John Dyson was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering.

Freeman Dyson was Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Freeman Dyson believed that some of the effects of increased CO2 levels are favourable and not taken into account by climate scientists, such as increased agricultural yield, and further that the positive benefits of CO2 likely outweigh the negative effects.

Freeman Dyson was skeptical about the simulation models used to predict climate change, arguing that political efforts to reduce causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority.

Freeman Dyson was born on 15 December 1923, in Crowthorne in Berkshire, England.

Freeman Dyson was the son of Mildred and the composer George Dyson, who was later knighted.

Freeman Dyson's mother had a law degree, and after Dyson was born she worked as a social worker.

Freeman Dyson had one sibling, his older sister, Alice, who remembered him as a boy surrounded by encyclopedias and always calculating on sheets of paper.

Politically, Freeman Dyson said he was "brought up as a socialist".

From 1936 to 1941 Freeman Dyson was a scholar at Winchester College, where his father was Director of Music.

Freeman Dyson feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life.

Taylor's advice and recommendation, Freeman Dyson moved to the United States in 1947 as a Commonwealth Fellow for postgraduate study with Hans Bethe at Cornell University.

Freeman Dyson recognized the brilliance of the flamboyant American and worked with him.

Freeman Dyson then moved to the Institute for Advanced Study, before returning to England, where he was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham.

In 1949, Freeman Dyson demonstrated the equivalence of two formulations of quantum electrodynamics : Richard Feynman's diagrams and the operator method developed by Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga.

Freeman Dyson was the first person after their creator to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams and his paper written in 1948 and published in 1949 was the first to make use of them.

Freeman Dyson said in that paper that Feynman diagrams were not just a computational tool but a physical theory and developed rules for the diagrams that completely solved the renormalization problem.

Also in 1949, in related work, Freeman Dyson invented the Freeman Dyson series.

Freeman Dyson joined the faculty at Cornell as a physics professor in 1951, though he still had no doctorate.

Freeman Dyson remained at the Institute until the end of his career.

From 1957 to 1961 Freeman Dyson worked on Project Orion, which proposed the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion.

In 1958 Freeman Dyson was a member of the design team under Edward Teller for TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used throughout the world in hospitals and universities for the production of medical isotopes.

In condensed matter physics, Freeman Dyson analysed the phase transition of the Ising model in one dimension and spin waves.

Freeman Dyson did work in a variety of topics in mathematics, such as topology, analysis, number theory and random matrices.

Freeman Dyson showed his formula to the mathematician Atle Selberg, who said that it looked like something in mathematical physics and that Montgomery should show it to Dyson, which he did.

Freeman Dyson recognized the formula as the pair correlation function of the Gaussian unitary ensemble, which physicists have studied extensively.

Around 1979 Freeman Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies.

Also during the 1970s, Freeman Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.

Freeman Dyson retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1994.

Freeman Dyson won numerous scientific awards, but never a Nobel Prize.

In 2012 Dyson published a fundamental new result about the prisoner's dilemma in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Freeman Dyson married his first wife, the Swiss mathematician Verena Huber, on 11 August 1950.

Freeman Dyson's eldest daughter, Esther, is a digital technology consultant and investor; she has been called "the most influential woman in all the computer world".

Freeman Dyson died on 28 February 2020 at a hospital near Princeton, New Jersey, from complications following a fall.

Freeman Dyson admitted his record as a prophet was mixed, but thought it is better to be wrong than vague, and that in meeting the world's material needs, technology must be beautiful and cheap.

Freeman Dyson coined the term "green technologies", based on biology instead of physics or chemistry, to describe new species of microorganisms and plants designed to meet human needs.

Freeman Dyson argued that such technologies would be based on solar power rather than the fossil fuels whose use he saw as part of what he calls "gray technologies" of industry.

Freeman Dyson believed that genetically engineered crops, which he described as green, can help end rural poverty, with a movement based in ethics to end the inequitable distribution of wealth on the planet.

Freeman Dyson favored the dual origin theory: that life first formed as cells, then enzymes, and finally, much later, genes.

Freeman Dyson proposed that in a primitive early cell containing ATP and AMP, RNA and replication came into existence only because of the similarity between AMP and RNA.

Freeman Dyson suggested that AMP was produced when ATP molecules lost two of their phosphate radicals, and then one cell somewhere performed Eigen's experiment and produced RNA.

In 1960 Freeman Dyson wrote a short paper for the journal Science titled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation".

Freeman Dyson said that he used the term "artificial biosphere" in the article to mean a habitat, not a shape.

Freeman Dyson proposed the creation of a Freeman Dyson tree, a genetically engineered plant capable of growing inside a comet.

Freeman Dyson suggested that comets could be engineered to contain hollow spaces filled with a breathable atmosphere, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer Solar System.

Freeman Dyson was interested in space travel since he was a child, reading such science fiction classics as Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.

Freeman Dyson hoped Project Orion would put men on Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970.

Freeman Dyson still hoped for cheap space travel, but was resigned to waiting for private entrepreneurs to develop something new and inexpensive.

Freeman Dyson proposed that an immortal group of intelligent beings could escape the prospect of heat death by extending time to infinity while expending only a finite amount of energy.

Montgomery and Freeman Dyson discovered that the eigenvalues of these matrices are spaced apart in exactly the same manner as Montgomery conjectured for the nontrivial zeros of the zeta function.

Freeman Dyson introduced the concept in a paper published in the journal Eureka.

Freeman Dyson first introduced the term without a definition in a 1944 paper in a journal published by the Mathematics Society of Cambridge University.

Freeman Dyson then gave a list of properties this yet-to-be-defined quantity should have.

Freeman Dyson contemplated how humanity could build a small, self-replicating automaton that could explore space more efficiently than a crewed craft could.

Freeman Dyson attributed the general idea to John von Neumann, based on a lecture von Neumann gave in 1948 titled The General and Logical Theory of Automata.

Freeman Dyson expanded on von Neumann's automata theories and added a biological component.

Freeman Dyson suggested that philosophers can be broadly, if simplistically, divided into lumpers and splitters.

Freeman Dyson agreed that technically humans and additional CO2 emissions contribute to warming.

Freeman Dyson said that in many ways increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is beneficial, and that it is increasing biological growth, agricultural yields and forests.

Freeman Dyson believed that existing simulation models of climate change fail to account for some important factors, and that the results thus contain too great a margin of error to reliably predict trends.

Freeman Dyson argued that political efforts to reduce the causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority and compared acceptance of climate change as real to religion.

Since originally taking interest in climate studies in the 1970s, Freeman Dyson suggested that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be controlled by planting fast-growing trees.

Freeman Dyson calculated that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere.

Freeman Dyson was a member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate change denial lobbying group.

In 1967, in his capacity as a military adviser, Freeman Dyson wrote an influential paper on the issue of possible US use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War.

Freeman Dyson says that the report showed that, even from a narrow military point of view, the US was better off not using nuclear weapons.

Freeman Dyson opposed the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.

Freeman Dyson supported Barack Obama in the 2008 US presidential election and The New York Times described him as a political liberal.

Freeman Dyson was one of 29 leading US scientists who wrote Obama a strongly supportive letter about his administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Freeman Dyson was raised in what he described as a "watered-down Church of England Christianity".

Freeman Dyson was a nondenominational Christian and attended various churches, from Presbyterian to Roman Catholic.

Freeman Dyson identified himself as agnostic about some of the specifics of his faith.