Jan Smit is a Dutch theoretical physicist. During his PhD at UCLA with professor Finkelstein

Finkelstein

Finkelstein is a German and Yiddish surname shared by a number of notable individuals:...

 he made some early contributions to lattice formulation of quantum field theory

Quantum field theory

Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...

 around 1972, which was a year before Kenneth Wilson, and two years before Alexander Polyakov. However, he encountered some problems with fermion doubling which he could not solve at the moment. At that time he did not realize the value of his work and he only mentioned it briefly in his Ph.D. thesis in 1974, which was about Schwinger source theory. A few years later he returned to working on the lattice formulation and became a well-known expert in the field.

He works at the University of Amsterdam at the Institute of Theoretical Physics.

External links

• Jan Smit at the University of Amsterdam