1982 Nobel Prize winners after having received the Nobel Literature Prize in Stockholm (Sweden). Seated from left to right: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Literature) and Swedish Sune K. Bergstrom (Medicine). Standing from left to right: American George Stigler (Economy), Swedish Bengt Samuelson (Medicine), British Aaron Klug (Chemistry), British John Vane (Medicine) and American Kenneth G. Wilson (Physics). (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
SACO, Maine (AP) - A physics professor who earned a Nobel prize for pioneering work that changed the way physicists think about phase transitions has died in Maine at age 77.
Kenneth Wilson was in the physics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for applying his research in quantum physics to phase transitions, the transformation that occurs when a substance goes from, say, liquid to gas. He created a mathematical tool that is still used in physics.
The son of a Harvard chemist, the Waltham, Mass., later retired from Ohio State University.
Wilson had been living in Gray, Maine. Friends and family say he died Saturday at a nursing home in Saco from complications of lymphoma.
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