Berni Alder

Berni Julian Alder (September 9, 1925 – September 7, 2020) was a German-born American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of computational modelling of matter.

Biography Alder was born in Duisburg, Prussia, in September 1925, to Jewish parents, a chemist and a homemaker. After the Nazis came to power, the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. Fearing an invasion by Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, the family applied for a visa to the United States, which was granted in 1941. including the liquid-solid phase transition for hard sphere and the velocity autocorrelations function decay in liquids.

Alder, along with Teller, was one of the founders of the Department of Applied Science in 1963. He was a professor of applied science at the University of California, Davis, and later professor emeritus.

Alder died on September 7, 2020, of heart failure. In 2009, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Alder was a Guggenheim Fellow. He was the editor of the book series Methods in Computational Physics and the founder of the magazine Computing.