caption doctoral_advisor death_date death_place work_institution birth_place nationality doctoral_students field birth_date known_for residence prizes article_title name alma_mater
rolf william landauer léon brillouin and wendell furry 28 april 1999 briarcliff manor , new york , u.s. nasa ibm stuttgart , germany german american none physicist 04 february 1927 landauer transport -rrb- 's principle , landauer formula -lrb- in quantum u.s. stuart prize -lrb- 1995 -rrb- edison medal -lrb- 1998 -rrb- ballantine medal -lrb- 1992 -rrb- oliver e. buckley rolf landauer
 rolf william landauer stuyvesant high school harvard university
rolf landauer

rolf william landauer -lrb- february 4 , 1927 -- april 28 , 1999 -rrb- was a german-american physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing , condensed matter physics , and the conductivity of disordered media .
in 1961 he discovered landauer 's principle , that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information , such as erasing a bit of memory , entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat .
this principle is relevant to reversible computing , quantum information and quantum computing .
he also is responsible for the landauer formula relating the electrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties .
he won the stuart ballantine medal of the franklin institute , the oliver buckley prize of the american physical society and the ieee edison medal , among many other honors .
