Benny Lautrup (25 June 1939 – 3 January 2025) was a Danish academic who was a professor in

theoretical physics Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict List of natural phenomena, natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental p ...

at the

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute () is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and biophysics. Overview The institute was foun ...

at the

University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen (, KU) is a public university, public research university in Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia, after Uppsala University. ...

. During his career he has worked at the

Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, or NORDITA, or Nordita (), is an international organisation for research in theoretical physics. It was established as Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Atomfysik in 1957 by Niels Bohr and the Swedish ...

(Denmark),

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratories, United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, New York, a hamlet of the Brookhaven, New York, Town of Brookhaven. It w ...

(USA),

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

(Switzerland), and the

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics (also with a small theoretical biology g ...

(France). He is known for his part in the Nakanishi-Lautrup formalism, a concept in

relativistic quantum field theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines field theory and the principle of relativity with ideas behind quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of suba ...

. He has published the books ''Neural Networks – Computers with Intuition'' with Søren Brunak (original in Danish) and also translated into German), and ''Physics of Continuous Matter: Exotic and Everyday Phenomena in the macroscopic World'' in 2005. A second edition of this book was published in 2011. He also wrote articles about physics and participated in the public debate in Denmark (list of articles). Lautrup participated in the documentary ''The Anatomy of Thought'' (Danish: ''Tankens Anatomi'') from 1997. He died on 3 January 2025, at the age of 85.Benny Lautrup In Memoriam
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References

External links

Personal homepage
1939 births 2025 deaths 21st-century Danish physicists People associated with CERN {{physicist-stub