Steven R. White

Biography

Steven R. White, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine. White received a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1987, where he studied under Nobel laureate Kenneth G. Wilson and John W. Wilkins. His research focuses on computational methods for strongly correlated quantum systems, particularly the development and application of numerical techniques to understand complex many-body problems in condensed matter physics.

White is the inventor of the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) method, introduced in his 1992 Physical Review Letters paper, which has become a fundamental tool in computational physics and quantum chemistry. This method enables accurate calculations of quantum systems that were previously intractable, and has been applied to problems ranging from high-temperature superconductivity to quantum magnetism. His work has addressed fundamental questions about the Hubbard model, spin liquids, and the mechanisms underlying superconductivity in cuprates.

White is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. White received the Rahman Prize in Computational Physics from the American Physical Society in 2003 and the Feenberg Memorial Medal in 2019. He served as Perimeter Institute Distinguished Visiting Research Chair from 2012 to 2018 and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Simons Flatiron Center for Computational Quantum Physics since 2017.

Education

• B.A. in Physics, Mathematics, and Economics, University of California, San Diego, 1982
• Ph.D. in Physics, Cornell University, 1988

Distinctions

• Physical Review Letters Milestone Paper of 1992, 2008
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2008
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016
• Member, National Academy of Sciences, 2018
• Feenberg Memorial Medal, 2019
• Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, American Physical Society, 2003
• Perimeter Institute Distinguished Visiting Research Chair, 2012-2018
• Visiting Scholar, Simons Flatiron Center for Computational Quantum Physics, 2017
• Fellow, American Physical Society, 1999
• Councillor, Division of Computational Physics, APS, 2000-2003