Rolf Landauer

Rolf William Landauer
Born	February 4, 1927 Stuttgart, Germany
Died	April 27, 1999(1999-04-27) (aged 72) Briarcliff Manor, New York, U.S.
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American-German
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	NASA IBM
Alma mater	Stuyvesant High School Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Léon Brillouin and Wendell Furry
Doctoral students	None
Known for	Landauer's principle, Landauer's Formula (in Quantum Transport)
Notable awards	Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1995) Edison Medal (1998)

Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 27, 1999) was an IBM physicist who in 1961 argued that when information is lost in an irreversible circuit, the information becomes entropy and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing.

Biography

Landauer was born on February 4, 1927, in Stuttgart, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews, graduated in 1943 from Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City's mathematics and science magnet schools, and obtained his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1945. Following service in the US Navy as an Electrician's Mate, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950.

He first worked for two years at NASA, then known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and at the age of 25 began a career in semiconductors at IBM. As part of the two-man team responsible for managing IBM's Research Division in the mid-1960s, he was involved in a number of programs, including the company's work on semiconductor lasers. In 1969, he was appointed an IBM Fellow.

Much of his research after 1969 related to the kinetics of small structures. He showed that in systems with two or more competing states of local stability, their likelihood depends on noise all along the path connecting them. In electron transport theory, he is particularly associated with the idea, taken from circuit theory, that electric flow can be considered a consequence of current sources as well as applied fields. He also pioneered in the area of information handling. His principles have been applied to computers and to the measurement process and are the basis for Landauer's own demonstration that communication, in principle, can be done without minimal unavoidable energy use.

Rolf William Landauer died on 27 April 1999 at his home in Briarcliff Manor from brain cancer.

Awards and honors

• Fellow, IEEE
• member, National Academy of Engineering
• member, National Academy of Sciences
• member, European Academy of Sciences and Arts
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• honorary doctorate, Technion in Israel
• 1991 Scott Lecturer at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University
• 1992 Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute
• Centennial Medal by Harvard in 1993,
• Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society (1995)
• Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMH) Science for Art Prize (1997)
• IEEE Edison Medal (1998) For pioneering contributions to the physics of computing and conduction.
• The Rolf Landauer Medal of the International ETOPIM Association (2009)

The range of his work has been recognized in special issues of two journals, 10 years apart. They are the IBM Journal of Research and Development (January 1988) and the Superlattices and Microstructures (March/April 1998).

External links

• The 'Landauer' formula
• Bio at IEEE Global History Network
• Stuyvesant math team
• PhysicsWeb Obituary
• Nature Obituary
• [1]

Further reading

• Perry, R. T. (2004). The temple of quantum computing. p. 26 – 27. Retrieved 11 January 2005.