Gordon Baym

Gordon Baym is a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois. He was educated at Brooklyn Technical High School, Cornell University, and Harvard University. He spent two years at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. and after a year at the University of California in Berkeley, settled down at the University of Illinois.

His interests in physics are wide ranging, from matter at low temperatures and under extreme conditions of pressure and energy, to ultracold atomic physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, and the history of physics. He is a pioneer in the study of pulsars and neutron stars, and a driver of laboratory studies of ultradense matter via ultrarelativistic collisions of heavy nuclei. His current interests include neutron stars, and neutrinos from the big bang.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the American Physics Society Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research as well as its Hans Bethe and Lars Onsager Prizes, and the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal. He is an Aspen homeowner and has been a regular participant in the Aspen Center for Physics since the mid 1960’s.