Anthony Zee

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Anthony Zee
Born	1945[1] Kunming, Republic of China
Alma mater	Princeton University Harvard University
Awards	Sloan Research Fellowship Humboldt Research Award Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of the American Physical Society
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical Physics
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara
Doctoral advisor	Sidney Coleman
Doctoral students	Stephen Barr David Wolpert

Anthony Zee (Chinese: 徐一鴻, b. 1945) (Zee comes from /ʑi²³/, the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Early Life and Education

Zee was born in Kunming, China, in 1945, but his family fled to Hong Kong just before the Cultural Revolution, when he was four years old.^[2][3] His father was a self-taught businessman, and after a few years in Hong Kong, during a slump in business, decided to move the family again, this time to Brazil.^[2] The family settled in Sao Paolo, where Zee attended an American international high school before immigrating to the US in 1962 to attend Princeton University, where he worked with physicist John Wheeler.^[2][4] After graduating from Princeton University, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University, where he focused on group theory in physics, supervised by Sidney Coleman.^[2] He graduated in 1970 and went on to complete a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[2] He would later return to the Institute from 1977-78 during a sabbatical year while on faculty at Princeton.^[2]

Career

After completing his postdoctoral studies, Zee accepted an assistant professorship at Rockefeller University in New York in 1972. He only stayed a year before returning to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1973.^[2] In his first year back at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader. However, Zee was denied tenure in 1978, so he moved to the University of Pennsylvania for two years.^[2] From there he went to the University of Washington before settling at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1985.^[5] At UCSB, Zee teaches courses on both general relativity and quantum field theory.^[6] The culmination of his teaching is his highly regarded and widely praised "trilogy" of graduate level textbooks: Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell, and Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. He is also the author of several books for general readers about physics and Chinese culture.

Research

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Zee specializes in theoretical physics; research interests include high energy physics, field theory, cosmology, biophysics, condensed matter physics, and mathematical physics.^[7] He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books on particle physics, condensed matter physics, anomalies in physics, random matrix theory, superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and other topics in theoretical physics and evolutionary biology, as well as their various interrelations.

Books

Technical:

• 1982. Unity of Forces in the Universe. Singapore: World Scientific.
• 2010. Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691140346^[8]
• 2013. Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691145587
• 2016. Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691162690
• 2020. Fly by Night Physics: How Physicists Use the Backs of Envelopes. Princeton University Press. 2020. ISBN 9780691182544.

General readers:

• 1989. An Old Man's Toy, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-02-633440-2
• 1990. Swallowing Clouds. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-671-74724-4
• 2007. Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. Foreword by Roger Penrose. ISBN 978-0-691-00946-9. 1986 1st ed. published by Macmillan; 2016 pbk edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-17326-9^[9]
• 2018. On Gravity: A Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject. Princeton University Press. 2018. ISBN 9780691174389.
• 2023. Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible. Princeton University Press. 2023. ISBN 9780691174297.

Awards and Honors

• Institute for Advanced Study Dyson Distinguished Visiting Professor^[10]
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship – 1973^[11]
• Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship – 2006-2007^[12]
• Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation Humboldt Research Award – 2011^[10]
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – 2014^[13]
• Fellow of American Physical Society (APS) - 2014^[14]

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Anthony Zee.

• Interview of Anthony Zee by David Zierler on 2020 December 15,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA
• Anthony Zee's Personal Web Page
• Anthony Zee on Google Scholar
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 1 of 4". YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013. (lectures given in 2004)
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 2 of 4". YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 3 of 4". YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "Quantum Field Theory, Anthony Zee | Lecture 4 of 4". YouTube. aoflex. 7 December 2013.
• "A Brief Introduction to General Relativity - with Anthony Zee". YouTube. The Royal Institution. 27 August 2020. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021.
• Zee, Anthony (14 October 2020). "Quantum Theory in a Nutshell". YouTube. CUPS - Cambridge University Physics Society. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021.