Biography

Born in Mineola, New York, of Polish and Italian origin, Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional - in part as a result of Frank Wilczek having been administered an IQ test. He was raised Catholic.

He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1970, a Master of Arts in Mathematics at Princeton University, 1972, and a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1974. Wilczek holds the Herman Feshbach Professorship of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was also a visiting professor at NORDITA.

Wilczek became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 2002. Wilczek won the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society in 2003. In the same year he was awarded the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Commemorative Medal from Charles University in Prague. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society. Wilczek was also the co-recipient of the 2005 King Faisal International Prize for Science. On January 25, 2013 Wilczek received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

He currently serves on the board for Society for Science & the Public.

Wilczek was married to Betsy Devine on July 3, 1973, and together they have two daughters, Amity (Academic Dean at Deep Springs College) and Mira (senior partner at Link Ventures.)

Wilczek is an agnostic.

Wilczek has appeared on an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, where Penn referred to him as "the smartest person ever had on the show."

In 2014, Wilczek penned a letter, along with Stephen Hawking and two other scholars, warning that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." He 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.

Research

In 1973 Wilczek, a graduate student working with David Gross at Princeton University, discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that "the closer quarks are to each other, the less the strong interaction (or color charge) between them"; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. The theory, which was independently discovered by H. David Politzer, was important for the development of quantum chromodynamics.

Wilczek has helped reveal and develop axions, anyons, asymptotic freedom, the color superconducting phases of quark matter, and other aspects of quantum field theory. He has worked on an unusually wide range of topics, ranging across condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and particle physics.

In 2012 he proposed the idea of a space-time crystal.

Current research

• "Pure" particle physics: connections between theoretical ideas and observable phenomena;
• behavior of matter: phase structure of quark matter at ultra-high temperature and density; color superconductivity;
• application of particle physics to cosmology;
• application of field theory techniques to condensed matter physics;
• quantum theory of black holes.

Publications

For lay readers

• 2015 A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design,(448pp), Allen Lane, ISBN 9781846147012
• 2014 (with Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and Stuart Russell). "Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines". Huffington Post.
• 2008. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00321-1.
• 2007. La musica del vuoto. Roma: Di Renzo Editore.
• 2006. Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys And a Trip to Stockholm. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-256-655-3.
• 2002, "On the world's numerical recipe (an ode to physics)," Daedalus 131(1): 142-47.
• 1989 (with Betsy Devine). Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics. W W Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-30596-8.

Technical

• 1988. Geometric Phases in Physics.
• 1990. Fractional Statistics and Anyon Superconductivity.

• Wilczek, F.; Gross, D. J. (1973). "Asymptotically Free Gauge Theories. I". Physical Review D 8 (10): 3633. Bibcode:1973PhRvD...8.3633G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.8.3633. OSTI 4312175.
• Wilczek, F.; Gross, D. J. (1973). "Ultraviolet Behavior of non-Abelian Gauge Theories". Physical Review Letters 30 (26): 1343. Bibcode:1973PhRvL..30.1343G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.30.1343.
• Wilczek, F.; Zee, A.; Treiman, S. B. (1974). "Scaling Deviations for Neutrino Reactions in Aysmptotically Free Field Theories". Joseph Henry Laboratories. doi:10.2172/4256152. OSTI 4256152.
• Wilczek, F.; Zee, A.; Kingsley, R. L.; Treiman, S. B. (1975). "Weak Interaction Models with New Quarks and Right-handed Currents". Physical Review D 12 (9): 2768-2780. Bibcode:1975PhRvD..12.2768W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.12.2768. OSTI 4082874.
• Wilczek, F. (1978). "Problem of Strong P and T Invariance in the Presence of Instantons". Physical Review Letters 40 (5): 279-282. Bibcode:1978PhRvL..40..279W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.40.279.
• Wilczek, F. (1982). "Quantum Mechanics of Fractional Spin Particles". Physical Review Letters 49 (14): 957. Bibcode:1982PhRvL..49..957W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.957.
• Wilczek, F.; Turner, M. S. (1990). "Inflationary Axion Cosmology". Physical Review Letters 66 (1): 5-8. Bibcode:1991PhRvL..66....5T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.66.5. OSTI 6099352.
• Wilczek, F.; Alford, M. G.; Rajagopal, K. (1998). "QCD at finite baryon density: Nucleon droplets and color superconductivity". Physics Letters B 422 (422): 247-256. arXiv:hep-ph/9711395. Bibcode:1998PhLB..422..247A. doi:10.1016/S0370-2693(98)00051-3.
• Wilczek, F. (1998). "Riemann-Einstein structure from volume and gauge symmetry". Physical Review Letters 80 (22): 4851-4854. arXiv:hep-th/9801184. Bibcode:1998PhRvL..80.4851W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.4851.
• Wilczek, F.; Fradkin, E. H.; Nayak, C.; Tsvelik, A. (1998). "A Chern-Simons effective field theory for the Pfaffian quantum Hall state". Nuclear Physics B 516 (3): 704-718. arXiv:cond-mat/9711087. Bibcode:1998NuPhB.516..704F. doi:10.1016/S0550-3213(98)00111-4.
• Wilczek, F.; Alford, M. G.; Rajagopal, K. (1999). "Color-flavor locking and chiral symmetry breaking in high density QCD". Nuclear Physics B 537: 443-458. arXiv:hep-ph/9804403. Bibcode:1999NuPhB.537..443A. doi:10.1016/S0550-3213(98)00668-3.
• Wilczek, F. (1999). "Quantum field theory". Reviews of Modern Physics 71 (71): S85-S95. arXiv:hep-th/9803075. Bibcode:1999RvMPS..71...85W. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.71.S85.
• Wilczek, F.; Schafer, T. (1999). "Continuity of quark and hadron matter". Physical Review Letters 82 (82): 3956-3959. arXiv:hep-ph/9811473. Bibcode:1999PhRvL..82.3956S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.82.3956.
• Wilczek, F.; Babu, K.S.; Pati, J.C. (2000). "Fermion masses, neutrino oscillations, and proton decay in the light of SuperKamiokande". Nuclear Physics B 566: 33-91. arXiv:hep-ph/9812538. Bibcode:1998hep.ph...12538B. doi:10.1016/S0550-3213(99)00589-1.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]