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Geoffrey Chew (born 1924) is an American theoretical physicist. Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley, since 1957, Emeritus since 1991. PhD in theoretical particle physics, 1944-1946, from University of Chicago. Physics faculty member at the University of Illinois, 1950-56. Member, National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Science. Hughes Prize of the American Physics Society for bootstrap theory of strong interactions, 1962. Lawrence Prize, 1969.
He was a student of Enrico Fermi, and his students include David Gross and John H. Schwarz. He was known as a leader of the S matrix approach to the strong interaction and the associated bootstrap principle, a theory whose popularity peaked in the 1960s when he led an influential theory group at UC Berkeley. S-matrix theorists sought to understand the strong interaction through the analytic properties of the scattering matrix or S matrix, rather than viewing the S-matrix as simply the output of a more fundamental theory. The S-matrix approach was largely abandoned by the particle physics community in the 1970s in favor of the theory of quantum chromodynamics, following the discovery of asymptotic freedom by his former student David Gross and others. Although a dead-end for the strong force, S-matrix theory did lead indirectly to the early discovery of string theory.
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