Aneesur Rahman (24 August 1927 – 6 June 1987) was an Indian-born American physicist who pioneered the application of computational methods to physical systems. His 1964 paper on liquid argon studied a system of 864

argon Argon is a chemical element; it has symbol Ar and atomic number 18. It is in group 18 of the periodic table and is a noble gas. Argon is the third most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere, at 0.934% (9340 ppmv). It is more than twice as abu ...

atoms on a

CDC 3600 The CDC 3000 series ("thirty-six hundred" or "thirty-one hundred") are a family of mainframe computer, mainframe computers from Control Data Corporation (CDC). The first member, the CDC 3600, was a 48-bit computing, 48-bit system introduced in 196 ...

computer, using a

Lennard-Jones potential In computational chemistry, molecular physics, and physical chemistry, the Lennard-Jones potential (also termed the LJ potential or 12-6 potential; named for John Lennard-Jones) is an intermolecular pair potential. Out of all the intermolecul ...

. His algorithms still form the basis for many codes written today. Moreover, he worked on a wide variety of problems, such as the

microcanonical ensemble In statistical mechanics, the microcanonical ensemble is a statistical ensemble that represents the possible states of a mechanical system whose total energy is exactly specified. The system is assumed to be isolated in the sense that it canno ...

approach to

lattice gauge theory In physics, lattice gauge theory is the study of gauge theories on a spacetime that has been discretized into a lattice. Gauge theories are important in particle physics, and include the prevailing theories of elementary particles: quantum ele ...

, which he invented with David J E Callaway. Aneesur Rahman was a native of Hyderabad, India. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics from Cambridge University in England and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Louvain University in Belgium. In 1960, Dr. Rahman began a 25-year tenure as a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, Ill.) (operated by the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

). In 1985, Dr. Rahman joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota as a professor of physics and fellow at the Supercomputer Institute. Dr. Rahman is known as the father of

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the Motion (physics), physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamics ( ...

, a discipline of physics that utilizes computers to simulate microscopic behavior of physical systems. In 1977, Dr. Rahman was awarded the Irving Langmuir Prize by the American Physical Society.

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project ...

's Group (at Los Alamos during the 1950s), George Vineyard's group (radiation damage studies at Brookhaven in 1960), as well as Tom Wainwright and Berni Alder's group (at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory in the 1950s) developed generalized leapfrog and event-driven molecular dynamics algorithms a bit earlier than Rahman. The

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

annually awards the Aneesur Rahman Prize for outstanding achievement in computational research. First awarded in 1993, the Aneesur Rahman Prize is the highest honour in the field of

computational physics Computational physics is the study and implementation of numerical analysis to solve problems in physics. Historically, computational physics was the first application of modern computers in science, and is now a subset of computational science ...

given by the American Physical Society.

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...

offers a special postdoctoral fellowship named after Aneesur Rahman to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to an outstanding doctoral scientist who is at an early point in a promising career.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rahman, Aneesur 1927 births 1987 deaths 20th-century Indian Muslims 20th-century Indian physicists Scientists from Hyderabad, India Alumni of the University of Cambridge Scientific computing researchers Fellows of the American Physical Society