Contact:	Bob Nelson						For immediate release
			(212) 854-5573					April 8, 1997
			rjn2@columbia.edu




Joaquin M. Luttinger, Columbia Professor, 73;
Leading Theorist of Condensed Matter Physics


	Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger, a leading theorist in solid state physics for 
whom Luttinger liquids are named, died at Mount Sinai Medical Center Sunday 
(April 6).  He was professor emeritus of physics at Columbia University, where he 
taught for 33 years.  He was 73.

	He died of complications resulting from myelodysplasia, a cancer of the 
bone marrow for which he had undergone treatment for the last three years, said 
his former wife, Abigail Thomas.  He was known to all as "Quin."

	"Quin Luttinger was one of the world's leading theorists in condensed 
matter physics and field theory," said T.D. Lee, Nobel laureate and University 
Professor at Columbia.  In the 1950s, Professor Luttinger published theoretical 
papers on effective mass theory and on the quantum theory of electrical 
conductivity that have since become central to the field of semiconductors, 
according to a longtime collaborator and friend, Walter Kohn, professor emeritus 
of physics and research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  
He also proposed that superconductivity does not require the presence of lattice 
vibrations, a theory confirmed when high-temperature superconductors were 
discovered in 1985.

	In the mid-sixties, he turned increasingly to mathematical models as an 
explanatory tool in the field of electron interactions, and began to consider models 
of one-dimensional electrons constrained to move only along a line.  He proposed 
that their behavior was similar to that of a liquid but qualitatively different from
that theorized by Soviet physicist and Nobelist Lev Davidovich Landau.  "No one
took it very seriously as a physical phenomenon, because such one-dimensional 
systems were virtually unknown," Dr. Kohn said.
	More recently, however, organic molecules with long, stringlike 
geometries, such as the molecule TTF-TCNQ, have been discovered, in which 
electrons evidence the behaviors Professor Luttinger predicted.  Electrons 
conducting in extremely fine wires and along the edges of molecular structures 
also are one-dimensional, and there has been a strong renewal of interest among 
condensed matter theorists and superconductivity researchers in so-called 
Luttinger liquids, Dr. Kohn said.

	Born in New York City on Dec. 2, 1923, to Paul and Sarah Luttinger, he 
earned the S.B. degree in 1944 and the Ph.D. in 1947, both in physics, from 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was a research assistant in physics in 
the last year of his studies at MIT.  He then received two consecutive 
appointments as a fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich 
from 1947 to 1949, and became a research assistant to the renowned Nobel 
physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed that no two electrons in an same 
atom could occupy the same quantum state.

	Professor Luttinger was named Frank B. Jewitt Fellow at the Institute for 
Advanced Study in Princeton, 1949-50, and then was appointed assistant professor 
of physics at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught from 1950 to 1952.  He 
returned to the Institute of Advanced Study the following year, then went to the 
University of Michigan, where he was associate professor of physics from 1953 to 
1957.  The following year he accepted an appointment as senior postdoctoral fellow 
at the Ecole Normale SupÚrieure in Paris.  

	Professor Luttinger served two years as professor of physics at the 
University of Pennsylvania and in 1960 joined the Columbia faculty as professor of 
physics with tenure, a post he retained until his retirement in 1993.  He was 
designated professor emeritus of physics in July 1993.

	He spent his summers from 1953 into the 1970s conducting research at Bell 
Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., the earlier of those years with Dr. 
Kohn.  "I think I can speak for him as well as for myself,"  Dr. Kohn said.  
"Scientifically, this was the happiest period of our lives."  The collaboration 
produced fundamental contributions to many-body quantum theory, according to
Richard Friedberg, professor of physics at Barnard College.
	The Columbia physicist was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 
1976 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, and was named 
Guggenheim Fellow for the year 1975-76.  He served as chairman of the 
Department of Physics at Columbia from 1977 to 1980.

	He and Ms. Thomas were married in 1970 and resided in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.  
They were separated in 1978 and later divorced, but remained "the best of friends," 
Ms. Thomas said.

	"You could call Quin any time of the day or night with a question about 
anything, art, music, politics, history, literature, the sciences, and he would 
know more than just the answer and he would love to tell you about it," she said.  
"He was more interested in life than anybody I ever knew."

	In addition to Ms. Thomas, he is survived by a brother, Lionel, of Andover, 
N.J., a sister, Judith Florence, of Albuquerque, N.M., a daughter, Catherine 
Luttinger, of Manhattan, and three stepchildren:  Sarah Waddell of Amagansett, 
N.Y., Jennifer Waddell of Cambridge, Mass., and Ralph Waddell of Shelter 
Island, N.Y.

	A memorial service will be held in  St. Paul's Chapel on the Columbia 
campus on April 29 at 1 p.m.


This document is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/.

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