Jan Smit (born 16 September 1943,

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

)Prof.dr. J. Smit (1943 - )
at Catalogus Professorum Academiae Rheno-Traciectae website. is a Dutch theoretical physicist. During his PhD at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...

with professor

Robert Finkelstein Robert Jay Finkelstein (March 26, 1916 – August 27, 2020) was an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics. Finkelstein was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in March 1916. After graduation from Pittsfield High ...

he made some early contributions to lattice formulation of

quantum field theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles a ...

around 1972, which was a year before Kenneth Wilson, and two years before Alexander Polyakov. However, he encountered some problems with fermion doubling which he could not solve at the moment. At that time he did not realize the value of his work and he only mentioned it briefly in his Ph.D. thesis in 1974, which was about Schwinger source theory. A few years later he returned to working on the lattice formulation and became a well-known expert in the field. He works at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bein ...

at the Institute of Theoretical Physics.

References

External links

Jan Smit at the University of Amsterdam
1943 births Living people 20th-century Dutch physicists University of California, Los Angeles alumni Academic staff of Utrecht University Scientists from Amsterdam Theoretical physicists {{physicist-stub