Oscar E. Lanford III *66

Oscar Lanford, a respected and influential professor in the field of mathematical physics, died of cancer Nov. 16, 2013, at the age of 74.

Lanford graduated from Wesleyan in 1960 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1966 under the direction of Arthur Wightman, the noted quantum field theorist. He then became a professor on the math faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

After Berkeley, Lanford was at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France, and from 1987 was a professor at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland until he retired in 2005. Lanford then returned to the United States and taught at New York University’s Courant Institute until 2012.

By today’s standards, his papers are not numerous, but they contain several items that have influenced directions that mathematical physics would take. Among the most prominent are the Boltzmann equation and the Dobrushin-Lanford-Ruelle equations. His approach to the first portable computers allowed him to define the field of computer-assisted proofs, which enabled him to prove Feigenbaum’s conjecture (which plays an important role in chaos theory).

At the time of his death, Lanford was survived by his wife, Regina, and a daughter, Lizabeth.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.