| Anthony Zee | |
| Birth Date: | 1945[1] |
| Birth Place: | Kunming, Republic of China |
| Field: | Theoretical Physics |
| Work Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| Alma Mater: | Princeton University Harvard University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Sidney Coleman |
| Doctoral Students: | Stephen Barr David Wolpert |
| 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 |
Anthony Zee (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.
Zee was born in Kunming, China, in 1945, but his family fled to Hong Kong 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. 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.[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. He graduated in 1970 and went on to complete a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would later return to the Institute from 1977-78 during a sabbatical year while on faculty at Princeton.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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