Ken Wilson Memorial Volume

Kenneth Geddes Wilson (1936–2013) — intellectual giant, Nobel Laureate, intrepid scholar, visionary thinker, pioneering physicist and a person of conscience — made seminal contributions to the foundations of contemporary physics and undertook tireless efforts to bring reforms in the educational system.The purpose of bringing out this volume is to commemorate the memory of Ken Wilson and to preserve the legacy of his ground-breaking advances. This volume brings together a collection of articles written by colleagues of Ken Wilson as well as fellow physicists and scholars — some of who knew him personally and others who are knowledgeable about his sterling contributions to the foundations of theoretical physics.The work of Ken Wilson covers many diverse and apparently unrelated fields, all of which were brought under a common paradigm by the creative and original development and application of the mathematics of quantum field theory. As observed by Wilson, “the intuitive ideas” of quantum field theory and of the entire program of renormalization, “were encased in a thick shell of formalism” and it is widely acknowledged that it was Wilson's visionary approach to quantum field theory that cut through this thick shell of formalism.Based on his deep understanding that the essence of quantum field theory is that it describes a system with infinitely many degrees of freedom, Wilson used the mathematics of quantum field theory and of the renormalization group to solve the problem of classical phase transitions — which consists of the cooperative behavior of infinitely many classical degrees of freedom. In doing this he greatly enhanced the domain of quantum field theory beyond the orbit of quantum systems as well as bringing new insights to quantum field theory from other disciplines.To commemorate the memory of Ken Wilson, many leading and illustrious physicists have agreed to contribute to this volume. These include Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, David Gross, Alexander Polyakov, John Schwarz, Kerson Huang, Hao Bailin, Alexander Zamolodchikov, Anthony Zee, Ramamurti Shankar, Edouard Brezin and David Wallace.