Ramamurti Shankar
Josiah Willard Gibbs Professor of Physics, Yale University
Prof. Ramamurti Shankar obtained his B. Tech. (EE) at IIT-Madras and his Ph.D. in Particle Physics at UC Berkeley. Following three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the physics faculty at Yale in 1977 and served as its chair during 2001-2007.
Prof. Shankar has worked on determining the quark-gluon coupling using ideas from S-matrix theory, the exact S-matrices for a few two-dimensional field theories (with Edward Witten), and (often with Ganpathy Murthy) the exact solution of several problems in the statistical mechanics of homogenous and random systems, the Hamiltonian theory of the Fractional quantum Hall effect, and topological insulators. Shankar provided the renormalization group foundations of Landau’s Fermi liquid theory.
Ramamurti Shankar is a compulsive pedagogue who has given public lectures on relativity and quantum mechanics. His Open Yale Courses on Introductory Physics, available on You Tube, have had over 40 million hits (with subtitles in China). He has written five books: Principles of Quantum Mechanics and Basic Training in Mathematics (Springer), Fundamentals of Physics I and II (Yale Press) and Field Theory and Condensed matter (Cambridge). His books have been translated into Polish, Greek and Chinese. Prof. Shankar was awarded the A.P. Sloan Fellowship, the Harwood Burns-Richard Sewell teaching prize from Yale and the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.
Prof. Shankar is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Simons Professor KITP Santa Barbara, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT-Madras.
Ramamurti Shankar has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Statistical Physics, the Dannie Heineman and the Lilienfeld Prize Committees of the APS, the Committee of Visitors at the National Science Foundation, advisory boards of KITP Santa Barbara, the Center for Correlated Electrons and Magnetism, Augsburg, the Mathematical and Physical Sciences section of the Simons Foundation and a Trustee of the Aspen Center of Physics.