Max Dresden (April 23, 1918, Amsterdam – October 29, 1997, Palo Alto) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist and historian of physics. He is known for his research in "statistical mechanics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics." (This obituary erroneously states that Dresden retired from SUNY in 1987 — the correct year is 1989. One of Dresden's former doctoral students, Peter B. Kahn (1935–2016) was the chair, from 1974 to the end of 1985, of the physics department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.)
Biography Dresden studied at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of Leiden, where he received the Dutch equivalent of an M.S. in 1938 and was a research assistant of H. A. Kramers. Kramers helped him get a studentship research position in 1939 at Columbia University under the supervision of Enrico Fermi. Dresden received his Ph.D. in 1946 from the University of Michigan. His thesis On the Problem of the Approach to Equilibrium in Statistical Mechanics was supervised by George Uhlenbeck. In 1949 Dresden became a US citizen.
He was from 1946 to 1957 a faculty member of the physics department of the University of Kansas, where he was eventually promoted to full professor. At Northwestern University he was from 1957 to 1960 a professor and chair of the physics department. He was a professor from 1960 to 1964 at the University of Iowa and then from 1964 until his retirement in 1989 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY), where he headed the Institute for Theoretical Physics. He won four teaching awards at Stony Brook. After his retirement as professor emeritus, he was from 1989 at SLAC a visiting scientist and at Stanford University a consulting professor in the history of physics. At various times during his career he held visiting positions at Fermilab, the Johns Hopkins University, the Argonne National Laboratory, the CERN, and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Dresden was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1989. (Search on last name "Dresden".) His doctoral students include James T. Cushing, Martin Gutzwiller, Paul Halpern, and Jorge Zanelli.
He was married twice and had four children.
Selected publications Articles
Chapter 8. Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics or the vagaries of time evolution by Max Dresden, pages 585–633 in Laurie Brown, Abraham Pais, Brian Pippard (editors) Twentieth Century Physics, Vol. 1, 1995, IOP Publishing/AIP Press Chapter. On personal styles and tastes in physics by Max Dresden, in C.S. Liu, S.T. Yau (editors) Chen Ning Yang: a great physicist of the 20th century, International Press 1995
Books H.A. Kramers: Between Tradition and Revolution, Springer 1987 ; 2012 ebook ebook as editor with Lillian Hoddeson and Laurie Brown: Pions to quarks: Particle physics in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press 1989 as editor with Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, and Michael Riordan: The rise of the Standard Model: Particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge University Press 1997 (with an introduction by Hoddeson on The rise of the standard model 1964–1979, pp. 3–35) hbk ; pbk
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