David Ceperley

David Matthew Ceperley (born 1949) is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics. Ceperley was born in Charleston, West Virginia USA in 1949, and attended George Washington High School there. He was a student at Atlantic College in Wales UK, received a BS degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1971 and a PhD in theoretical physics at Cornell University in 1976. His advisors were Geoffrey Chester at Cornell University and Malvin Kalos at the Courant Institute at New York University. He had postdoctoral appointments in Orsay, France, New York University and Rutgers University, where he worked with Joel Lebowitz on the simulation of polymers. He was a staff scientist at the National Resource for Computational Chemistry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1978 to 1987. Since 1987, he has been a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a staff member at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from 1987 to 2012. In his development as a leading mathematical and computational physicist Ceperley had a number of acknowledged mentors, many of whom happen to be his former supervisors such as Geoffrey Chester, Malvin Kalos, Joel Lebowitz and Berni Alder. At UIUC he has been influenced by the physics Nobel Laureates Anthony Leggett and John Bardeen. Ceperley was married to Perine Davis (1950–2015); they have three children. Ceperley's methods have turned the path-integral formulation of the quantum mechanics of strongly interacting many-particle systems into a precise tool to elucidate quantitatively the properties of electrons in solids, superfluids, and other complex quantum systems.