Pieter Willem "Piet" Kasteleyn (12 October 1924 – 16 January 1996) was a
Dutch
Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
** Dutch people as an ethnic group ()
** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship ()
** Dutch language ()
* In specific terms, i ...
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 cau ...
famous for his contributions to the field of
statistical mechanics
In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. Sometimes called statistical physics or statistical thermodynamics, its applicati ...
.
Biography
Pieter Willem Kasteleyn was born in Leiden on 12 October 1924. After finishing high school in 1942, Kasteleyn briefly studied chemistry in Amsterdam. After the war, Leiden University reopened, where he undertook the study of physics and graduated in 1951. He defended his Ph.D. thesis working under S.R. de Groot in 1956.
In 1963 Kasteleyn was nominated Full Professor at the Lorentz Institute of Theoretical Physics in Leiden.
In 1979 he was elected a member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.
In addition to various advisory a ...
. From 1981 to 1985 he acted as secretary of the Physics Section of the Academy. From 1978 to 1984 he was chairman of the Commission for Theoretical Physics of the Dutch National Physics Foundation. He retired in 1985.
He died on 16 January 1996, after an unexpected and short illness.
Research
While investigating dimers on a
square lattice
In mathematics, the square lattice is a type of lattice in a two-dimensional Euclidean space. It is the two-dimensional version of the integer lattice, denoted as . It is one of the five types of two-dimensional lattices as classified by their ...
(essentially a
domino tiling
In geometry, a domino tiling of a region in the Euclidean plane is a tessellation of the region by domino (mathematics), dominoes, shapes formed by the union of two unit squares meeting edge-to-edge. Equivalently, it is a matching (graph theory), ...
), he independently discovered combinatorial
Fisher-Kasteleyn-Temperley algorithm.
In a series of papers with
C. M. Fortuin he developed
random cluster model and obtained the
FKG inequality. For
Bernoulli percolation on graphs he formulated the
Bunkbed conjecture.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kasteleyn, Pieter
1996 deaths
1924 births
20th-century Dutch physicists
Leiden University alumni
Academic staff of Leiden University
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences