Peter Kramer (born 1933 in

Quedlinburg Quedlinburg () is a town situated just north of the Harz mountains, in the district of Harz in the west of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. As an influential and prosperous trading centre during the early Middle Ages, Quedlinburg became a center of in ...

) is a German

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate ca ...

Personal life

Kramer studied physics at the

University of Münster The University of Münster (german: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, WWU) is a public research university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. With more than 43,000 students and over 120 fields of stud ...

, the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-W� ...

, the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a Red brick university, red brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Society of Merchant Venturers, Merchant Venturers' sc ...

and the

University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg (german: Philipps-Universität Marburg) was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Protestant university in the worl ...

. He received his PhD in 1964 in Marburg and in 1968 his Habilitation in Tübingen. He was a postdoc at the

UNAM The National Autonomous University of Mexico ( es, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) is a public research university in Mexico. It is consistently ranked as one of the best universities in Latin America, where it's also the bigges ...

Mexico City Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley of ...

, where he collaborated with

Marcos Moshinsky Marcos Moshinsky Borodiansky (russian: Маркос Мошинский Бородянский; uk, Маркос Мошинскі; 1921–2009) was a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian- Jewish origin whose work in the field of elementary particles ...

. He was a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tübingen from 1970 until 1998 when he retired. He has also served as a Dean and a Vice President at the University of Tübingen. Kramer married in 1962 and has two children.

Scientific work

Kramer's work is concerned with applications of groups and

representations ''Representations'' is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It ...

mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and t ...

. His early work was in

nuclear physics Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions, in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter. Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the ...

. In the early eighties he and his student Roberto Neri developed a mathematical model for quasiperiodic tesselations of three-dimensional space. Their paper was submitted in 1983 and published in 1984, the same year that

Dan Shechtman Dan Shechtman ( he, דן שכטמן; born January 24, 1941)Dan Shechtman
. (PDF). Retri ...

and his co-workers announced the experimental discovery of an

alloy An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductilit ...

with

icosahedral In geometry, an icosahedron ( or ) is a polyhedron with 20 faces. The name comes and . The plural can be either "icosahedra" () or "icosahedrons". There are infinitely many non- similar shapes of icosahedra, some of them being more symmetrica ...

quasi-crystalline structure. Shechtman was awarded the 2011

Nobel Prize in chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

for his work. More recently, Kramer has become interested in

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosophe ...

and three-dimensional

space form Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consid ...

s. His scientific œuvre contains more than 200 publications.

Publications

* P. Kramer, G. John and D. Schenzle: ''Group Theory and the Interaction of Composite Nucleon Systems.'' Vieweg, Braunschweig 1981 * P. Kramer and M. Saraceno: ''Geometry of the Time-dependent Variational Principle in Quantum Mechanics.'' Lecture Notes in Physics 140, Springer, Berlin 1981 * P. Kramer and R. Neri: ''On periodic and non-periodic space fillings of E^m obtained by projection.'' In: ''Acta Crystallogr.'' A 40, 1984, 580-587 * P. Kramer and A. Mackay: ''Crystallography: Some answers but more questions.'' In: ''Nature'' 316, 1985, 17-18 * P. Kramer: ''Gateways towards quasicrystals.'' 201
arXiv:1101.0061v1
* P. Kramer: ''Platonic topology and CMB fluctuations: homotopy, anisotropy and multipole selection rules.'' In: ''Class. Quantum Grav.'' 27, 2010,

References

External links

Homepage of Peter Kramer at the University of Tübingen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kramer, Peter 20th-century German physicists 21st-century German physicists 1933 births Living people People from Quedlinburg University of Tübingen faculty