Anthony Zee

Anthony Zee
Born	1945[1] Kunming, Republic of China
Alma mater	Princeton University Harvard University
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara
Doctoral advisor	Sidney Coleman
Doctoral students	Stephen Barr David Wolpert

Anthony Zee (Chinese: 徐一鴻, b. 1945) (Zee comes from /ʑi²³/, the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

After graduating from Princeton University, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1970, supervised by Sidney Coleman. During 1970–72 and 1977–78, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1973 to 1978, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. In his first year as assistant professor at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader.

Zee has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books. He has written on particle physics, condensed matter physics, anomalies in physics, random matrix theory, superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and other topics in theoretical physics and evolutionary biology, as well as their various interrelations.

Zee is an accomplished teacher, covering both general relativity and quantum field theory. The culmination of his teaching is his highly regarded and widely praised "trilogy" of graduate level textbooks: Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell, and Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. He is also the author of several books for general readers about physics and Chinese culture.

Books

Technical:

• 1982. Unity of Forces in the Universe. Singapore: World Scientific.
• 2010. Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691140346^[2]
• 2013. Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691145587
• 2016. Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691162690
• 2020. Fly by Night Physics: How Physicists Use the Backs of Envelopes. Princeton University Press. 2020. ISBN 9780691182544.

General readers:

• 1989. An Old Man's Toy, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-02-633440-2
• 1990. Swallowing Clouds. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-671-74724-4
• 2007. Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. Foreword by Roger Penrose. ISBN 978-0-691-00946-9. 1986 1st ed. published by Macmillan; 2016 pbk edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-17326-9^[3]
• 2018. On Gravity: A Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject. Princeton University Press. 2018. ISBN 9780691174389.
• 2023. Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible. Princeton University Press. 2023. ISBN 9780691174297.

Notes

External links

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