Anthony Zee


Anthony Zee 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.

Early life and education

Zee was born in Kunming, China, in 1945, but his family fled to Hong Kong when he was four years old. His father was a self-taught businessman, and after a few years in Hong Kong, during a slump in business, decided to move the family again, this time to Brazil. The family settled in São Paulo, where Zee attended an American international high school before emigrating to the US in 1962 to attend Princeton University, where he worked with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. After graduating from Princeton, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University, where he focused on the use of group theory in physics, supervised by Sidney Coleman. He graduated in 1970 and went on to complete a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would later return to the institute in 1977 and 1978 during a sabbatical year while on faculty at Princeton.

Career

After completing his postdoctoral studies, Zee accepted an assistant professorship at Rockefeller University in New York in 1972. He only stayed a year before returning to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1973. In his first year back at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader. In 1978 Zee moved on to the University of Pennsylvania for two years. From there he went to the University of Washington before settling at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1985. At UCSB, Zee teaches courses on 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.

Research

Zee specializes in theoretical physics; research interests include high energy physics, field theory, cosmology, biophysics, condensed matter physics, and mathematical physics. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books 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.

Evolutionary biology

In winter 2001, Johns Hopkins University Press published an article by Zee titled "On Fat Deposits around the Mammary Glands in the Females of Homo Sapiens" in the New Literary History. Zee described the female breasts and reproductive system from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. He wrote, "The reproductive value of a woman at a given time is her fertility integrated from that time until the end of her reproductive life. While fertility typically peaks in the mid-twenties, reproductive value peaks in the teens." and "Like the mammary glands in the male, the female orgasm does not appear to serve any useful biological function. In most primates, female orgasm is either absent or inconspicuous." This article was published after Ralph Louis Cohen invited Zee to write an article of his choice in the literary magazine.

Books

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Awards and honors