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Jack B. Swift
Jack Bernard Swift born on January 3. 1942, in Charleston, Arkansas, to Ollie August and Nola Grace McKamie Swift. He has a younger brother, John. His father worked in the gas industry.
Jack's earliest memories are of living on his parents' farm near the small town of Charleston, Arkansas. His family moved to Charleston, population 1300, when Jack was five. He attended the public schools in Charleston and graduated as Valedictorian of his high school class. Jack participated in track in high school and on a visit back to his hometown while at the University of Arkansa,s he was informed by his track coach that his team record for the 220 yard dash had been eclipsed.
Jack received his B.S. in physics at the University of Arkansas in 1963 and went on to graduate school at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his M.S. in 1965. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree under celebrated physicist, Leo P. Kadanoff, in 1968. His thesis was entitled "Topics in Fluid Phase Transitions." Jack did post-doctoral work at Max-Planck Institute für Physik and Astrophysik, Munich (1968-69) and Harvard (1969-71). At Harvard he worked with Professor Paul Martin. In 1971, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, rising to the rank of full professor. Jack was an active member of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics. He had visiting appointments at Bell Labs and Brown University. He was recognized with a Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in 1973. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
In 1971, Jack married Jennifer Ruth Wallenfels in Manhattan, NY. Jennifer was born in Leeds, England to Kurt Wallenfels and Edith Hubler Wallenfels. Kurt and Edith were from Vienna, Austria. Kurt, alone, and Edith and her family left Austria to escape the Holocaust. Kurt's family did not survive. Kurt and Edith met and married in England where Jennifer and her brother, Ronald, were born, The family later emigrated to the United States in 1952. Her education included a BS Degree in Geology from Queens College. NYC; a Masters in Geology from Harvard University; and later a Doctorate in Science Education from University of Texas at Austin. She had scholarly publications in journals of science education as well as published science activities for elementary students. Jennifer worked for over two decades Holt, Rinehart and Winston as a manager in the Research Department. She loved ice skating. She died in 2004, after a courageous five-year battle with cancer. Jack and Jennifer's two children are Kimberly and Terry.
In his early work, Swift used the mode-mode coupling formalism to investigate dynamical critical phenomena. The first quantitative predictions of the singular behavior of the thermal conductivity and diffusion constant near critical points were the results of this work. Swift’s research is focused on two areas: (a) the theoretical investigation of instabilities, pattern formation, and chaos in nonequilibrium, nonlinear systems, particularly convection, and (b) the statistical mechanics of liquid crystals. In the mid 1970s, he and Hohenberg developed a simplified field model which has been widely used to study patterns, instabilities, wavelength selection, onset, and the effects of thermal noise in convecting systems. He and co-workers have developed and studied methods, particularly the spectrum of Lyapunov exponents for characterizing the complex behavior of systems exhibiting chaos. With collaborators, including members of an experimental group, he has investigated pattern competition in temporally modulated convection. He and collaborators have addressed the problem of the effects of thermal noise near hydrodynamic instabilities, with emphasis on quantitative predictions which may be compared with high precision experiments. In a long term effort, he and collaborators have studied the thermodynamic, structural, viscous, and hydrodynamic properties of nematic phase of liquid crystals. The website ResearchGate list 87 publications and over 12,000 citations.
Jack was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1994 “for his contributions to the understanding of instabilities and pattern formation in convection, Couette-Taylor flow, and liquid crystals, and for the development (with Hohenberg) of the widely studied Swift-Hohenberg equation.”
Jack was an excellent teacher. In 2004 he was recognized with the University of Texas Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. .Jack mentored 14 PhD students.
His hobbies include cycling. Jack also enjoys reading, particularly history and biography, and old movies
Jack retired in 2008 and was awarded emeritus status.
Acknowledgement: Some of this information came from the book "Physics at Arkansas" by Paul C. Sharrah.
Jack Swift Photo Album |
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Jack Swift, right end, U. of Arkansas, 1960 |