Robert Mills - Definition and Overview

For other persons of the same name please see Robert Mills (disambiguation).

Robert L. Mills (April 15, 1927 - October 27, 1999) was a physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing a office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in 1954, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang-Mills fields. This equation reduces to Maxwell's Equations as a special case, see gauge theory: <math> \partial_{\mu}F^{\mu\nu} + 2 \epsilon ( b_\mu \times F^{\mu\nu} ) = J^\nu <math>.

Mills was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and graduated from George School. He studied at Columbia College, 1944-1948, while on leave from the Coast Guard. Mills demonstrated his mathematical ability by winning the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1948, and by receiving first-class honors in the Tripos. He earned a master's degree from Cambridge, and a Ph.D.in Physics under Norman Kroll, from Columbia in 1955. After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Mills was a professor of Physics at Ohio State University from 1956 to his retirement in 1995.

Mills and Yang shared the 1980 Rumford Premium Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for their "development of a generalized gauge invariant field theory" in 1954.

Notes

• Yang, Mills 1954 Physical Review 95, 631.
• Yang, Mills 1954 Physical Review 96, 191.