Lawrence Paul Horwitz

Lawrence Paul Horwitz was born in New York City on October 14, 1930. He lived in Westchester County until 1934, then went to London where his father founded and managed a chain of womens wear shops, called the Richard Shops, and then returned to the United States in 1936. After a few years in Brooklyn, NY, his family moved to Forest Hills in Queens, NY, where he learned tennis and attended Forest Hills High School, a school dedicated to teaching students how to think, where he came to love physics. He then went to the College of Engineering, New York University, where he studied Engineering Physics and graduated summa cum laude with a Tau Beta Pi key and the S.F.B. Morse medal for physics. He met a young lady, Ruth Abeles, who arrived from Germany in the U.S. in 1939 and became his wife before moving on to Harvard University in 1952 with a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He received his doctorate at Harvard working under the supervision of Julian Schwinger in 1957. He then worked at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory where he met Herman Goldstine, a former assistant to John von Neumann and, among other things, explored with him octononic and quaternionic Hilbert spaces from both physical and mathematical points of view. He then moved on to the University of Geneva in 1964, becoming involved in scattering theory as well as continuing his studies of hypercomplex systems with L. C. Biedenharn and becoming involved in particle physics with Yuval Neeman at CERN. He became full professor at the University of Denver in 1966-1972; he then accepted a full professorship at Tel Aviv University. After stopping for a year to work with C. Piron at the University of Geneva on the way to Israel, he has been at Tel Aviv University since 1973, with visits at University of Texas at Austin, Ilya Prigogine Center for Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems in Brussels, and at CERN, ETH (Honggerberg, Zurich), University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT), IHES (Bures-sur-Yvette, Paris), and Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), where he was a Member in Natural Sciences, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2003 with short visits in August 1990, and January 1991, working primarily with S. L. Adler. He is now Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, Bar Ilan University, and Ariel University. His major interests are in particle physics, statistical mechanics, mathematical physics, theory of unstable systems, classical and quantum chaos, relativistic quantum mechanics, relativistic many body theory, quantum field theory, general relativity, representations of quantum theory on hypercomplex Hilbert modules, group theory and functional analysis, theories of irreversible quantum evolution, geometrical approach to the study of the stability of classical Hamiltonian systems, and to the dark matter problem, and classical and quantum chaos. He is a member of the American Physical Society (Particle Physics), Swiss Physical Society, European Physical Society, International Association for Mathematical Physics, Israel Physical Society, Israel Mathematics Union, European Mathematical Society, International Quantum Structures Association, Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the International Association for Relativistic Dynamics.