Aneesur Rahman

Who was Aneesur Rahman?

Aneesur Rahman pioneered the application of computational methods to physical systems. His 1964 paper on liquid argon studied a system of 864 argon atoms on a CDC 3600 computer, using a Lennard-Jones potential. His algorithms still form the basis for many codes written today. Moreover, he worked on a wide variety of problems, such as the microcanonical ensemble approach to lattice gauge theory, which he invented with David J E Callaway.

Aneesur Rahman was a native of Hyderabad, India. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics from Cambridge University in England and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Louvain University in Belgium. In 1960, Dr. Rahman began a 25-year tenure as a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. In 1985, Dr. Rahman joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota as a professor of physics and fellow at the Supercomputer Institute.

Dr. Rahman is known as the father of molecular dynamics, a discipline of physics that utilizes computers to simulate microscopic behavior of physical systems. In 1977 Dr. Rahman was awarded the Irving Langmuir Prize by the American Physical Society.