Sidney R. Coleman
Sidney R. Coleman, the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard and one of the truly unique characters in theoretical physics, died on November 18, 2007, at age 70. Sidney was born in Chicago on March 7, 1937. He graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1957 and went on to graduate school at California Institute of Technology, where he studied with Murray Gell-Mann. In 1961, Coleman came to Harvard as the Corning Lecturer and Fellow. For over 30 years Sidney was the leader of the Harvard group in particle theory. Sidney’s great love was “quantum field theory,” the theoretical language combining quantum mechanics and special relativity. As his Nobel Prize-winning colleague, Steven Weinberg said, “Sidney was most interested in understanding the foundations of theory rather than the special cases relevant to describing nature, and he revealed many of the deepest aspects of this grand theoretical structure through his work.” In the...