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Photo by Donna Coveney/MIT

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Frank Wilczek's Autobiography BOOKS

Professor Frank Wilczek
Born: May 15, 1951
Physicist, Nobel Prize Winner (2004)

Frank Wilczek is one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together.

He was born in Mineola, New York, the son of a Polish father (Frank John Wilczek - an electronics technician) and an Italian mother (Mary Rose Cona). His grandfather Jan Wilczek joined Haller's Army in 1919 and served as a private until 1920, fighting first in Galicia and later on the Russian front.

Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Chicago (1972) and his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1974). He taught at Princeton from 1974-81. During the period 1981-88, he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000, he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Since 2002, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia, Chile.

Professor Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975-77) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982-87). He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Michelson Prize from Case Western University, and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. He contributes regularly to Physics Today and to Nature, explaining topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences. He received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for these activities. Two of his pieces have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2003, 2005). Together with his wife, he wrote a beautiful book, Longing for the Harmonies (W.W. Norton). His new book The Lightness of Being: Mass Ether, and the Unification of Forces (Perseus) appeared in September 2008.

While watching the televised Fischer-Spassky chess match at Princeton in June 1972 he met Elizabeth Jordan (Betsy) Devine. They were married on July 3, 1973 and live in Cambridge, Mass. They have two daughters, Amity and Mira. Amity, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard, is currently a postdoctoral associate in biology there. Mira, who earned her S.B. from MIT in 2004, works for IBM in Boston.

From: Frank Wilczek Resume, MIT Press Release (2004) and
information from various sources collected by the Poles in America Foundation

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Photo by Donna Coveney/MIT 1990 physics Nobelist Jerome Friedman congratulates colleague Frank Wilczek on winning the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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Photo by Donna Coveney/MIT MIT physics professor Frank Wilczek explains his Nobel Prize-winning theory at a press conference Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004.

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