Rolf Landauer
Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 27, 1999) was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1950, and then spent most of his career at IBM.
Rolf William Landauer | |
|---|---|
Landauer September 1969 | |
| Born | February 4, 1927 |
| Died | April 27, 1999 (aged 72) |
| Nationality | German American |
| Alma mater | Stuyvesant High School Harvard University |
| Known for | Landauer's principle Landauer formula |
| Awards | Stuart Ballantine Medal (1992) Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1995) Edison Medal (1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | NASA IBM |
| Thesis | Phase Integral Approximations in Wave Mechanics: I. Reflections in One-Dimensional Wave Mechanics. II. Phase Integral Approximations in Two and Three Dimensions. (1950) |
| Doctoral advisor | Léon Brillouin Wendell Furry |
In 1961 he discovered Landauer's principle, that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing. He also is responsible for the Landauer formula relating the electrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties. He won the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and the IEEE Edison Medal, among many other honors.