Pieter Kasteleyn

Pieter Willem Kasteleyn
Born	October 12, 1924 Leiden
Died	January 16, 1996 Leiden
Nationality	Dutch
Institutions	Leiden University
Alma mater	Leiden University
Doctoral advisor	L.J. Oosterhoff, S.R. de Groot
Notable students	C.M. Fortuin
Known for	FKT algorithm, Random cluster model, FKG inequality

Pieter (Piet) Willem Kasteleyn (October 12, 1924 – January 16, 1996) was a Dutch physicist famous for his contributions to the field of Statistical Mechanics.

Biography

Pieter Willem Kasteleyn was born in Leiden on October 12, 1924. After finishing high school in 1942, Kasteleyn briefly studied chemistry in Amsterdam. After the war Leiden University reopened and he undertook the study of physics which he graduated in 1951. He defended his Ph.D. thesis working under S.R. de Groot in 1956.

In 1963 Kasteleyn was nominated Full Professor at the Lorentz Institute of Theoretical Physics in Leiden. In 1979 he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[1] From 1981 to 1985 he acted as secretary of the Physics Section of the Academy. From 1978 to 1984 he was chairman of the Commission for Theoretical Physics of the Dutch National Physics Foundation. He retired in 1985.

He died on January 16, 1996, after an unexpected and short illness.

Research

While investigating dimers on a square lattice (essentially a domino tiling), he independently discovered combinatorial Fisher-Kasteleyn-Temperley algorithm.^[2] In a series of papers with C. M. Fortuin^[3] he developed random cluster model and obtained the FKG inequality.

References

1. "P.W. Kasteleyn (1924 - 1996)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 24 January 2016.
2. Kasteleyn, P. W. (1961), "The statistics of dimers on a lattice. I. The number of dimer arrangements on a quadratic lattice", Physica 27 (12): 1209–1225, doi:10.1016/0031-8914(61)90063-5
3. "On the random-cluster model : I. Introduction and relation to other models".

External links

• "Obituary: Piet Kasteleyn, 1924-1996".