Loup Verlet (; 24 May 1931 – 13 June 2019) was a French physicist who pioneered the computer simulation of molecular dynamics models. In a famous 1967 paper he used what is now known as

Verlet integration Verlet integration () is a numerical method used to integrate Newton's equations of motion. It is frequently used to calculate trajectories of particles in molecular dynamics simulations and computer graphics. The algorithm was first used in 17 ...

(a method for the numerical integration of equations of motion) and the

Verlet list A Verlet list (named after Loup Verlet) is a data structure in molecular dynamics simulations to efficiently maintain a list of all particles within a given cut-off distance of each other. This method may easily be applied to Monte Carlo simulati ...

(a data structure that keeps track of each molecule's immediate neighbors in order to speed computer calculations of molecule-to-molecule interactions). He received his PhD in 1957; his PhD work was initially conducted in the group of

Victor Weisskopf Victor Frederick "Viki" Weisskopf (also spelled Viktor; September 19, 1908 – April 22, 2002) was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Boh ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

and concluded under the guidance of

Maurice Lévy Maurice Lévy (February 28, 1838, in Ribeauvillé – September 30, 1910, in Paris) was a French engineer and member of the Institut de France. Lévy was born in Ribeauvillé in Alsace. Educated at the École Polytechnique, where he was a stu ...

at the

École normale supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

in Paris. From 1957 to 1993 he worked mostly on the physics of the liquid state. He also wrote about the history of science. In his book "La Malle de Newton" (1993) he argued that

Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton () was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment that followed ...

was an important transition figure between the medieval, mainly religious, world of ideas and the modern scientific way of analyzing physical problems. Newton had a foot in both worlds, as shown by the fact that his writings are not only concerned with mathematics and physics, but also theology and alchemy, a combination that might seem bizarre by modern standards. The publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 and the

Glorious Revolution The Glorious Revolution, also known as the Revolution of 1688, was the deposition of James II and VII, James II and VII in November 1688. He was replaced by his daughter Mary II, Mary II and her Dutch husband, William III of Orange ...

of 1688 (with the king's powers limited by an elected Parliament) were the key events that brought the old era to a close and ushered in the modern one. His last book was 'Chimères et Paradoxes' (Ed. Cerf, 2007), an extended essay that touches on the philosophy of science as well as the history of science. Among other things, it considers how three great thinkers ( Descartes, Newton and

Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...

) changed our world view.

Bibliography

*L. Verlet: "Computer Experiments on Classical Fluids", PhysRev. Vol. 159, No. 98, July 1967 *D. Levesque and L. Verlet: Molecular-dynamics and time reversibility. J. Stat. Phys., 72(3-4), 1993.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Verlet, Loup 1931 births 2019 deaths French physicists