Anthony Zee

Who is Anthony Zee?

Anthony Zee is a Chinese American physicist, writer, and currently a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

After graduating from Princeton, Zee obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970, supervised by Sidney Coleman. During 1970-72 and 1977–78, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1973 to 1978, he was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. In his first year as assistant professor at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader.

Professor Zee has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books. He has written on particle physics, condensed matter physics, anomalies in physics, random matrix theory, superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and other topics in theoretical physics and evolutionary biology, as well as their various interrelations.

Zee is an accomplished teacher, covering both general relativity and quantum field theory. The culmination of his teaching is his text Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. He is also the author of several books for general readers about physics and Chinese culture.