Professor Wilczek will join the MIT physics faculty in September 2000. Professor Wilczek is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. His earliest work, done with David Gross at Princeton, led to the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which describes the interactions of quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons.
Asymptotic freedom means that quarks interact more weakly the closer they are together.
This concept makes it possible to understand the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, such as occurred in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Professor Wilczek has also made important contributions to condensed-matter physics and cosmology. A native of Mineola, NY, Professor Wilczek received the BS in 1970 from the University of Chicago and the PhD in 1973 from Princeton University. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a John and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the J.J. Sakurai prize of the American Physical Society. The Feshbach chair was created to honor the Institute Professor emeritus, who, like Professor Wilczek, is a distinguished theoretical physicist.