Alfred (Fred) Scharff Goldhaber passed away in October, 2024. Fred was a faculty member at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook nearly from its founding, and a valued member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy for as many years. In his more than fifty years as a faculty member at Stony Brook, he advanced the understanding of diverse areas of physics. Generations of Institute and Department members have benefited from the collegial tone and openness to wide-ranging scientific discussions that Fred helped establish.
On Monday April 28, 2025, the YITP held a symposium in Fred's memory, honoring and celebrating both his major scientific contributions and recent developments that Fred would surely have found fascinating.
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The YITP is proud to have participated in the organization and presentation of Stony Brook University's celebration of the broad and deep impact of James Simons (1938 - 2024) on and beyond the campus. A full-day event was held at the Simons Center auditorium next door, with first-hand testimony from people who worked with Jim, videos that captured his commitment and wit, and a series of mini public lectures describing his mathematical discoveries and the wide-ranging research that his generosity made possible.
Yichul Choi received a 2024 President's Award for Distinguished Doctoral Students in recognition of "outstanding merit" for his dissertation research, Generalized Symmetries in Quantum Field Theory and Particle Physics. His doctoral research was supervised by Shu-Heng Shao and Zohar Komorgadski. The concept of generalized symmetries has a special resonance at the YITP, named for its founding director, the originator of the application of nonabelian symmetries to quantum field theory. Yichul has joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton as a Roger Dashen Member. Other YITP winners of Presidential Awards include Connor Behan (2019), Wolfger Peelars (2016), Mao Zeng (2016), Matt von Hippel (2014), Abhijit Gadde (2012), Leandro Almeida (2010) and Ilmo Sung (2010), Carola Berger (2003), Shu-Chiuan Chang, (2002), Gianluca Oderda (1999), Shan-Ho Tsai (1998) and Alexander Kusenko (1994).
2003 Nobel Laureate David Gross presented the 2024 Colloquium, the third in this annual series. In a wide-ranging review of the discovery and development of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a cornerstone of the Standard Model of fundamental matter and forces. In a spirited presentation, Prof. Gross gave students, postdocs and faculty alike a first-hand perspective of the ideas and experiments that led to the threshold of the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the signature property of nonabelian gauge theories like QCD, and to the consequences that have flowed from that discovery. The colloquium was a standing-room only affair, capping a day of conversations, including a lunch with graduate students.
