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Freeman Dyson, Mathematical Prodigy in Einstein Era, Dies at 96

Freeman Dyson, Mathematical Prodigy in Einstein Era, Dies at 96

(Bloomberg) -- Freeman Dyson, the U.K.-born mathematician who solved problems for nuclear physicists, tested the barriers to space travel and challenged the widely accepted science of climate change, has died. He was 96.

He died Feb. 28 in Princeton, New Jersey, according to the Institute for Advanced Study.

Dyson was affiliated with Princeton-based IAS for more than 60 years. He rose to prominence during the 1950s as a math prodigy who translated ideas into equations for scientists who had brought the U.S. into the nuclear age.

Freeman Dyson, Mathematical Prodigy in Einstein Era, Dies at 96

A colleague of Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, Dyson helped unify quantum and electrodynamic theories -- describing the interaction of light and matter -- with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

“I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous,” he said in a 2014 interview with Quanta magazine.

Dyson was considered so gifted that Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, made him a professor in 1951 even though he never received a doctorate. Later in the decade, he led a team at General Atomics in San Diego designing a class of small nuclear reactors, known as Triga, still used by hospitals for diagnostic purposes.

Rocket Alternative

Pursuing his childhood dreams of interplanetary travel, Dyson and his team at General Atomics, including physicist Edward Teller, designed the Orion spaceship that became a candidate for use in the U.S. space program. Propelled by small, nuclear explosions below the craft, Orion lost out to Wernher von Braun’s rockets, which were chosen for the Apollo missions that sent 24 men to the moon.

A nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets ended Dyson’s plans for flights to Saturn and beyond without NASA’s help.

“For me, Orion meant opening up the whole solar system to life,” Dyson said, according to a 2009 New York Times article. “It could have changed history.”

Dyson enraged the environmental movement in later years with his outspoken opposition to the prevailing consensus on climate-change science. Though he acknowledged an increase in global temperatures and a lack of formal expertise in the field, the contrarian scientist said higher levels of carbon in the atmosphere would help plants grow faster and make life easier for people in colder regions. He was also skeptical of measures to rein in global warming.

‘Remain Neutral’

“I’m not saying the majority is necessarily wrong,” he said in the Quanta interview. “I’m saying that they don’t understand what they’re seeing. It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled, so I shall remain neutral until something very different happens.”

Freeman John Dyson was born Dec. 15, 1923, in the English village of Crowthorne, about 30 miles west of central London. His father, George, was a composer who became director of the Royal College of Music in 1937 and was knighted in 1941. Dyson’s mother trained as a lawyer and was involved in social work, running a birth-control clinic for women.

He attended Winchester College from 1936 until 1941, when he began his studies at Cambridge University. After two years, he joined the war effort and took a civilian job for the British Bomber Command, conducting operational research on how to deploy pilots most efficiently. The needless loss of life caused by a failure on the part of the military bureaucracy to initiate change gave him a lasting disdain for war, according to his 1984 book “Weapons and Hope.” He completed his Cambridge studies in 1945, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics.

Academic Posts

Dyson became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, after the war before accepting a fellowship at Cornell in 1947. After two years as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein spent the last two decades of his life, Dyson became a professor there in 1953. Four years later, he became a U.S. citizen.

An author of popular books for the lay reader, Dyson wrote an autobiography titled “Disturbing the Universe” (1979), warned about the threat of nuclear arms in “Weapons and Hope,” and gave credence to the idea that life on Earth began twice in the biology-focused book “Origins of Life” (1985). He won the U.S. Energy Department’s Enrico Fermi Award in 1993, the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2000, and the Henri Poincare Prize in 2012.

“Freeman Dyson is one of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following his equations,” according to a 2010 Atlantic story.

Dyson is survived by his wife Imme, and children Esther, an investor in new technologies, George, Dorothy, Emily, Mia, Rebecca and step-daughter Katarina.

To contact the reporter on this story: David Henry in Frankfurt at sgittelson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Charles W. Stevens, Steven Gittelson

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