Peter Kramer (physicist)
Encyclopedia
Personal Life
Kramer studied physics in MünsterMünster
Münster is an independent city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also capital of the local government region Münsterland...
, Tübingen
Tübingen
Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...
, Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
und Marburg
Marburg
Marburg is a city in the state of Hesse, Germany, on the River Lahn. It is the main town of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district and its population, as of March 2010, was 79,911.- Founding and early history :...
. He obtained his PhD in 1964 in Marburg and his Habilitation in 1968
in Tübingen. He was a postdoc at the UNAM
Unam
UNAM or UNaM may refer to:* National University of Misiones, a National University in Posadas, Argentina*National Autonomous University of Mexico , the large public autonomous university based in Mexico City...
in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, where he collaborated with Marcos Moshinsky
Marcos Moshinsky
Marcos Moshinsky was a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian origin whose work in the field of elementary particles won him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation in 1988 and the UNESCO Science Prize in 1997....
.
Since 1970 he is Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tübingen. He served as a Dean and a Vice President at his university.
Since 1998 he is retired. Kramer is married since 1962 and has two sons.
Scientific work
Kramer's work is concerned with applications of groupsGroup theory
In mathematics and abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as groups.The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as rings, fields, and vector spaces can all be seen as groups endowed with additional operations and...
und representations
Representation theory
Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebraic structures by representing their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studiesmodules over these abstract algebraic structures...
in mathematical physics
Mathematical physics
Mathematical physics refers to development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines this area as: "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and...
.
His early work is in nuclear physics
Nuclear physics
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...
. In the early eighties he and his student Roberto Neri discovered the mathematical model for quasiperiodic tesselations
of the three-dimensional space.
Their article appeared shortly before Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S...
's article, where quasi-crystals were for the first time described experimentally.
Shechtman was awarded in 2011 the Nobel Prize in chemistry
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature,...
for his discovery.
During the last years, Kramer became interested in cosmology
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
and three-dimensional space forms
Space form
In mathematics, a space form is a complete Riemannian manifold M of constant sectional curvature K. The three obvious examples are Euclidean n-space, the n-dimensional sphere, and hyperbolic space, although a space form need not be simply connected.-Reduction to generalized crystallography:It is a...
. His scientific œvre contains more than
200 publikations.
Publications
- P. Kramer, G. John and D. Schenzle: Group Theory and the Interaction of Composite Nucleon Systems. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1981
- P. Kramer and M. Saraceno: Geometry of the Time-dependent Variational Principle in Quantum Mechanics. Lecture Notes in Physics 140, Springer, Berlin 1981
- P. Kramer and R. Neri: On periodic and non-periodic space fillings of Em obtained by projection. In: Acta Cryst. A 40. 1984, 580–587 doi:10.1107/S0108767384001203
- P. Kramer and A. Mackay: Crystallography: Some answers but more questions. In: Nature 316, 1985, 17–18 doi:10.1038/316017a0
- P. Kramer: Gateways towards quasicrystals. 2010 arXiv:1101.0061v1
- P. Kramer: Platonic topology and CMB fluctuations: homotopy, anisotropy and multipole selection rules. In: Class. Quantum Grav. 27, 2010, doi:10.1088/0264-9381/27/9/095013