Benjamin Widom papers

Benjamin Widom (born 13 October, 1927) is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. His research interests include physical chemistry and statistical mechanics. Widom was born in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from New York City’s Stuyvesant High School in 1945 and received his BA in Chemistry from Columbia in 1949, followed by his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1953 where he did graduate work under Simon Bauer, Phillip Morrison, Hans Bethe, and Mark Kac. From 1952 to 1954, he completed post-doctoral work under O.K. Rice at the University of North Carolina. He became an instructor of Chemistry at Cornell in 1954, as appointed assistant professor in 1955, and a full professor in 1963. He was Chair of the Chemistry Department between 1978 and 1981.

In 1978, Widom began working with John Rowlinson to co-author Molecular Theory of Capillarity (1982), considered the authoritative work on theories of interfaces. The work was translated into Russian by A.I. Rusanov and V.L. Kuzmin. In 2002, Widom published Statistical Mechanics: A concise introduction for chemists through Cambridge University Press. The work was translated into Japanese by Kenichiro Koga.

Widom was awarded the Boltzmann Medal in 1998 “for his illuminating studies of the statistical mechanics of fluids and fluid mixtures and their interfacial properties, especially his clear and general formulation of scaling hypotheses for the equation of state and surface tensions of fluids near critical points.” He has also been awarded the New York Academy of Sciences Boris Pregel Award in Chemical Physics, the ACS Langmuir Medal in Chemical Physics (1982), ACS Hildebrand Award in Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids, the Carnegie Mellon University Dickson Prize for Science (1987), the University of Wisconsin Hirschfelder Prize, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Bakhuys Roozeboom Medal, and the ACS Award in Theoretical Chemistry (1999). He was elected a member of the National Academy of the Sciences in 1974 and a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 1979 and is also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Widom is father to Michael Widom, a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University, Elizabeth Widom, a professor of geology at Miami University, and the late Jonathan Widom, a professor of biochemistry at Northwestern University. He is brother to Harold Widom, professor emeritus of mathematics at U.C. Santa Cruz.