Ramamurti shankar biography
Ramamurti Shankar (born April 28, 1947) is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics at Yale University. His research is in theoretical condensed matter physics , although he is also known for his earlier work in theoretical particle physics. He received his B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley. After three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the Yale physics department, which he chaired between 2001-2007. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is dedicated to teaching and has published three texts: Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Basic Training in Mathematicsand Fundamentals of Physics.: A Fitness Program for Science Students.
VP: Is this your first time in IIT Kanpur? How has the experience been so far?
RS: Yes it is. It’s been great.
VP: You did your B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras and are now one of the most respected Theoretical Physicists in the international community. How did you make the transition from engineering to pure sciences? Was it tough?
RS: It was tough because it was hard to get into IIT and once you get in you want to stay in. I had no intention of doing anything else. It is only by accident that I ran into some interesting books on Physics by Feynman. And I was reading them initially only for fun and then I realised that this is something I want to do. So I wanted to quit then and there but my father counseled me to finish what I had started. This happened in the middle of my second year. It was a five year B.Tech program. I had about three years to learn all the topics you need to go to Graduate School. So, when I finished my B.Tech, I gave the GRE and went to Berkley. It is a great place to go to because it is a very good school and yet it is big enough that it can take a gamble. They don’t know anything about me. I tell them
Ramamurti Shankar
Ramamurti Shankar, recently appointed as the J.W. Gibbs Professor of Physics, focuses his research on theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum field theory.
Early in his career, Shankar studied elementary particles, the smallest particles from which everything else is made, and their interaction with each other. When he joined the Yale faculty, his focus shifted to statistical mechanics, a field founded by J.W. Gibbs, the Yale scientist who made major theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Shankar’s research led to several significant solutions to existing problems in this field. His latest area of interest is the quantum Hall effect, in which as the number of particles carrying an electrical charge is continuously increased, the electrical conductivity rises, not continuously, but in steps whose heights are stable to a part in a billion.
Shankar earned his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California-Berkeley. After serving as a junior fellow at Harvard University for three years, he began his teaching career at Yale in 1977 as J. W. Gibbs instructor of physics. He was named a full professor of physics in 1988, and chaired the department from 2001 to 2007.
Shankar designed and taught, for nearly a decade, Physics 301a, a one-semester course aimed at first-years and sophomores, to bridge the gap between their mathematical knowledge and the expectations of their teachers. The book he wrote based on his lectures, “Basic Training in Mathematics,” now serves as the text for the course at Yale and elsewhere. His Physics 200 and 201 lectures, available online as part of Open Yale Courses and other platforms like iTunes and YouTube, have been viewed over 20 million times.
Shankar is the author of four other books: “Principles of Quantum Mechanics,” “Fundamentals of Physics” (two volumes), and “Quantum Field Theory and Condense American physicist Ramamurti Shankar (born April 28, 1947) is the Josiah Willard Gibbs professor of Physics at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. He received his B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1974). His research is in theoreticalcondensed matter physics, although he is also known for his earlier work in theoretical particle physics. In 2009, Shankar was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society for "innovative applications of field theoretic techniques to quantum condensed matter systems". After three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the Yale physics department, which he chaired between 2001-2007. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the second Indian after S. Chandrasekhar to be a member of Harvard Society of Fellows. His Youtube lectures have been viewed by over 20 million people. In 2004 he was appointed the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and in 2019 the Josiah Willard Gibbs Professor of Physics. Ramamurti Shankar
Education
Career
Selected publications
References
External links
Yale physicist R Shankar teaches physics combined with a liberal dose of humour
"I don't know what your major is. I don’t know what you are going to do later, so I picked the topics that all of us in physics find fascinating. Some may or may not be useful, but you just don’t know.”
When Shankar, who is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics & Applied Physics, starts a lecture in this way, with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye, his older students know it is a set-up.
“Some of you are probably going to be doctors,” he continues, “and you don’t know why I’m going to do special relativity or quantum mechanics...If you’re a doctor and you’ve got a patient who’s running away from you at the speed of light, you’ll know what to do. Or, if you’re a paediatrician with a really small patient who will not sit still, it’s because the laws of quantum mechanics don’t allow an object to have a definite position and momentum.”
Shankar is only a minute into the lecture, but his students already know what to expect: some serious physics from the age of Newton up to its great 20th century revolutions. They will also discover that it’s very different from any physics course they’ve encountered. Physics is deep and fun to do. When Shankar teaches it, it is also deeply funny.
Such physics with a touch of humour was available only to select Yale students at one time, but is now watched by students all over the world. Yale videotaped and put his course online free in 2007 and 2011. Shankar’s lectures were among the first that Yale University put online as part of an experiment.
“The introductory courses in physics are quite serious,” Shankar told ET last week when he came to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to receive his distinguished alumnus award. “They are taken by non-physics people...The intro is to tell ev