George Uhlenbeck - Recognition

Recognition

Uhlenbeck received five honorary degrees. In addition, he received the Research Corporation award in 1953, the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1955, the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 1964, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970, the National Medal of Science in 1977, along with Goudsmit, and the Wolf Prize, also shared with Goudsmit, in 1979.

Uhlenbeck was a friend of many of the great physicists and mathematicians of his era, including Enrico Fermi and Oskar Klein. E.G.D. Cohen, a student of Uhlenbeck's, described his teacher::

... often admonished me that rather than trying to be original, it was much more important to be clear and correct and to summarise critically the present status of a field in the Ehrenfest tradition. He wisely observed that what is often of lasting value is not the first original contribution to a problem, but rather the final clearly and critically written survey. That is certainly what he did in this Brownian motion paper!

Describing Uhlenbeck's work, Cohen writes:

Uhlenbeck's papers are all relatively short and stand out by their conciseness, precision, and clarity, finely honed to a deeper understanding of a basic problem in statistical physics. They do not contain long formal derivations and are almost all geared to concrete problems. ... they were of a classic nobility, mathematical purity and clarity ... He felt that something really original one did only once – like the electron-spin--the rest of one's time one spent on clarifying the basics.

Cohen also comments on the high quality of Uhlenbeck's teaching:

He was an inspiring teacher. With superbly organised and extremely clear lectures, he laid bare for everyone to see the beautiful structure of statistical mechanics, based on the principles of the founding fathers, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. Thus he transmitted to a younger generation what he conceived to be the essence of the past and the way to the future. In doing so, he educated several generations of physicists in statistical mechanics in a style rare in this century.