Max Dresden

Max Dresden (April 23, 1918, Amsterdam – October 29, 1997, Palo Alto) was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist and historian of physics. He is known for his research in "statistical mechanics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics."

Biography Dresden studied at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of Leiden, where he received the Dutch equivalent of an M.S. in 1938 and was a research assistant of H. A. Kramers. Kramers helped him get a studentship research position in 1939 at Columbia University under the supervision of Enrico Fermi. Dresden received his Ph.D. in 1946 from the University of Michigan. His thesis On the Problem of the Approach to Equilibrium in Statistical Mechanics was supervised by George Uhlenbeck.

He was from 1946 to 1957 a faculty member of the physics department of the University of Kansas, where he was eventually promoted to full professor. At Northwestern University he was from 1957 to 1960 a professor and chair of the physics department. At various times during his career he held visiting positions at Fermilab, the Johns Hopkins University, the Argonne National Laboratory, the CERN, and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

His research has spanned nearly all of theoretical physics including statistical mechanics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, the behavior of positrons, parastatistics, symmetries and S matrix theory, particle physics, nonstandard analysis, and nonlinear dynamics. His doctoral students include James T. Cushing, Martin Gutzwiller, Paul Halpern, and Jorge Zanelli. as editor with Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, and Michael Riordan: The rise of the Standard Model: Particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge University Press 1997 (with an introduction by Hoddeson on The rise of the standard model 1964–1979, pp. 3–35) hbk ; pbk