Richard Dryden Field Jr. (born April 13, 1944) is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.[1] He is known particularly for his contributions to the phenomenology of particle production in high-energy particle accelerators.
Starting in 1971, he did post-doctoral work at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1973 he moved to California Institute of Technology to work with Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
It was there that he did his most-cited work, producing the "Field-Feynman" Monte Carlo used to compare the production of observable particles arising from the fragmentation of quarks and gluons in different particle accelerator environments. Two papers from this work,[3][4] each with over 1000 citations, continue to be referenced as of 2021[update].
[5]
During this time he served as the PhD thesis advisor to computer-scientist/physicist Stephen Wolfram, who is CEO of Wolfram Research and was considered a physics prodigy in his student years. In 1980, Field moved to the University of Florida as a professor and, later, emeritus professor.[1]
Honors
He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1987, "for contributions to the application of the Quantum Chromodynamic theory of quarks and gluons to hadron hadron collisions and the concept of parton fragmentation".[6]
References
12Rick Field profile, University of Florida website; accessed December 12, 2021.
