Kenneth Wilson

From the Nobel Foundation:

The home base for his research has been elementary particle theory, and he has made several contributions to this subject: a short distance expansion for operator products presented in an unpublished preprint in 1964 and a published paper in 1969; a discussion of how the renormalization group might apply to strong interactions, in which he discussed all possibilities except the one (asymptotic freedom) now believed to be correct; the formulation of the gauge theory in 1974 (discovered independently by Polyakov), and the discovery that the strong coupling limit of the lattice theory exhibits quark confinement. He is currently interested in trying to solve Quantum Chromodynamics (the theory of quarks) using a combination of renormalization group ideas and computer simulation.

He is also interested in trying to unlock the potential of the renormalization group approach in other areas of classical and modern physics. He has continued to work on statistical mechanics (specifically, the Monte Carlo Renormalization Group, applied to the three dimensional Ising model) as part of this effort.

"Kenneth G. Wilson: Biographical," Nobel Foundation (1982)

Nobel Laureate, Physics Prize, 1982