Nigel D Goldenfeld

Professor

Ph.D. Physics University of Cambridge, England 1982

Professor Goldenfeld received his bachelor's and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Cambridge, England, in 1979 and 1982, respectively. After a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, he joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 1985. He was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and to full professor in 1995. 

Professor Goldenfeld studies two main types of problems: how patterns in physical systems evolve in time and how new laws of physics arise in a system from the collective behavior of its component parts (emergent states of matter).

Although he is best known for his seminal contributions to condensed matter physics, In recent years, Professor Goldenfeld has become increasingly interested in problems of quantitative biology, including ecology, scaling laws, biocomplexity, microbial ecology, and evolution. His group is currently engaged in a NSF-funded $5,000,000 multi-institution, multidisciplinary effort to explore the emergence of life from early geochemistry.

He has also applied his skills to quantitative finance and medical physics; he co-founded NumeriX, a high tech company that markets fast numerical software products for derivative risk management in the financial markets and for radiation therapies for cancer treatment.

Professor Goldenfeld is an outstanding teacher who has contributed significantly to course development in our department and who has a singular ability to convey his excitement and interest in physics to his students. He has described his approach to teaching in this way: "I try to make the problems interesting, sometimes even unusual. My attitude . . . is summed up in a aphorism attributed to Confucius: 'I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.'" His book, Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1992), has been adopted by many graduate schools as the text of choice for this important subject.

For more information:

Nigel Goldenfeld's Home Page
Goldenfeld's Research Group

Honors and awards:

• Fellow of the American Physical Society (1995)
• Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1987-1991)
• Junior Xerox Award for Faculty Research (1991)
• Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Teaching (May 2002)
• University Scholar (1994-1997)
• Beckman Fellow, Center for Advanced Study-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Fall, 1988)

Selected Publications:

• Nigel Goldenfeld and Roger Haydock. Phase diagram for Anderson disorder: beyond single-parameter scaling. Phys. Rev. B 73, 045118:1-10 (2006)
• Nigel Goldenfeld. Roughness-induced criticality in a turbulent flow. Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 044503:1-4 (2006)
• N. D. Goldenfeld, B. P. Athreya, and J. A. Dantzig. Renormalization group approach to multiscale simulation of polycrystalline materials using the phase field crystal model. Phys. Rev. E 72, 020601-1-4 (2005).
• N. Israeli and N. D. Goldenfeld. Computational irreducibility and the predictability of complex physical systems. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 074105-1-4 (2004).
• N. D. Goldenfeld and L. Kadanoff. Simple lessons from complexity. Science 824, 87-89 (1999).