Herbert Wagner (physicist)
Herbert Wagner is a German theoretical physicist, who mainly works in statistical mechanics. He is a professor emeritus of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.Biography
Wagner was one of the last students of German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg, with whom he worked on magnetism.
As a postdoc at Cornell University, he and David Mermin proved a "no-go theorem", otherwise known as the Mermin–Wagner theorem. The theorem states that continuous symmetries cannot be spontaneously broken at finite temperature in systems with sufficiently short-range interactions in dimensions.
Wagner is the academic father of a generation of statistical physicists. Many of his students and junior collaborators now occupy chairs in German universities, including
Hans Werner Diehl,
Siegfried Dietrich,
Gerhard Gompper,
Reinhard Lipowsky,
Hartmut Löwen,
Klaus Mecke,
and Udo Seifert.Awards
In 1992, Wagner was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Essen. In 2016 he received the Max Planck Medal for his fundamental works on the statistical physics of low-dimensional systems.
