Gerald Brown

Gerald (Gerry) Brown, a theoretical physicist who played a key role in the development of modern atomic, many-body and nuclear physics as well as astrophysics, died at his home in Setauket, New York on May 31. Brown was SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. His influential research began in the years following World War II, as physicists turned from war work to fundamental research, delving deeper and more precisely into the motion of electrons in atoms and the internal structure of atomic nuclei.

Gerry Brown was the author or co-author of nearly four hundred research papers, with contributions that were both wide-ranging and deep. He was drawn to some of the most difficult problems, for example in his early work in atomic physics, treating the Lamb shift in high-Z atoms. Over the years, he developed methods to treat strongly interacting and many-body systems that are still in use today. A landmark achievement was to establish a microscopic basis for nuclear structure, through a renormalization group-based theory of nucleon-nucleon interactions, which unified multiple phenomenological fits to nuclear forces. He successfully applied this theory of nucleon-nucleon forces to the bulk properties of nuclei and effective theory parameters, in the spirit of Landau Fermi Liquid theory. His model for nucleon structure, known as “Little Brown Bag”, put early emphasis on the pion and vector meson “cloud”.

Gerry was a consistent leader in applying the chiral symmetry of quantum chromodynamics to nucleon structure and nuclear physics. He also applied “hidden gauge symmetry” for vector mesons, now naturally explained by holographic models.

Another famous Brown program was devoted to the formation of supernovae, including a game-changing analysis of the nuclear equation of state and entropy, leading to many subsequent insights into the formation of neutron stars and black holes.

Gerry collaborated widely, and was particularly proud of his scientific and personal relationships with those he called his “three eagles”: Gregory Breit, his doctoral advisor, Rudolf Peierls, the leader of the theory group at the University of Birmingham, and Hans Bethe, his partner in the study of supernovae for thirty years. In the final years of his own active career, he served as Bethe’s scientific executor, editing a biographical tribute with Chang-Hwan Lee. He had outstanding success in his own right as a teacher and doctoral research advisor. He supervised directly over seventy doctoral students, with many of whom he maintained strong professional and personal ties throughout his lifetime. He was known for his generosity and kindness as a mentor.

Gerry left an engaging scientific and personal memoir in “Fly with Eagles,” Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science, 51, 1 (2001).

See as well the essay “What is the Universe? G.E. Brown, His Life and Work,” by Sabine Lee in “From Nuclei to Stars, Festschrift in Honor of Gerald E. Brown,” World Scientific (2011).

Gerald Brown was born in Brookings, South Dakota, the son of a Professor of Mathematics at South Dakota State College and the nephew of farmers. In 1943, he left high school to enlist in the Navy. The war ended while he was still in an officers’ training program that included study at the University of Wisconsin. As a post-war civilian he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Wisconsin (1946) on the GI bill, continuing on to graduate study.

In 1947, he moved with his advisor, Gregory Breit, to Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1950. As a graduate at Yale, Gerry involved himself in left-wing politics, eventually joining the Connecticut State Communist Party, but being quickly expelled for questioning the party line. Subsequently, he maintained a principled resistance to providing information on former associates. With the McCarthy Era on the horizon, he moved to Birmingham University at Peierls’s invitation. In Birmingham, after earning a D.Sc. degree in one year, he served as lecturer and eventually Professor.

For much of this period, he lacked a valid U.S. passport, which was only issued in 1958. In 1960, Gerry joined the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics (NORDITA), Copenhagen, and in 1964 became Professor of Physics at Princeton, splitting his time with NORDITA. He moved from Princeton to the still-new Stony Brook University in 1968, drawn by Nobel Prize-winner Chen Ning Yang, who had himself joined Stony Brook in 1966. In 1985, Gerry retired from NORDITA, and was full time at Stony Brook until his retirement in 2009.

Gerry was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1978. He was also a member of the national scientific academies of Denmark, Finland and Norway. He held honorary doctorates from the Universities of Copenhagen, Helsinki and Birmingham, and received numerous other awards and honors, including the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society (1982), the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute (1992), Max-Plank Medal of German Physical society (1996) and the Hans A. Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society (2001). He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was a founder and long-time editor of the highly-regarded journals Physics Letters, specializing in short, high-impact papers, and Physics Reports, devoted to in-depth reviews (both North-Holland Publishing Co.).

Gerry Brown’s extraordinary insight, numerous acts of kindness, and wry sense of humor made him a legend in the world physics community. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth, his children Hans, Nicky, Annegret, Claudia, Bernard and Titus, and seven grandchildren.

Many of Gerry’s admiring colleagues at Stony Brook contributed to this notice.