Paul Frederick Zweifel

Paul Zweifel was born on June 21, 1929, in New York City, to Dorothy and Frederick Zweifel. His family moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina. When he was fifteen, he received the Pepsi-Cola Scholarship to attend the college of his choice, Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), and graduated with a B.S. in Physics in 1948. Zweifel worked at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory as a physicist and a manager of theoretical physics, where he did research on the theory of the slowing down and thermalization of neutrons from mid-1953 to 1958. == Conferences ==

During a sabbatical year from the University of Michigan spent as a Visiting Professor at the Middle East Technical University in 1964–1965, Paul and physicist Erdal İnönü organized a two-week NATO Advanced Study Institute on Transport Theory held in Ankara, Turkey. In 1969, Paul, along with Robert Erdmann and Charles Siewert, founded a series of conferences that have become known as the International Conference on Transport Theory, or ICTT meetings. The conferences continue to bring together experts in mathematical and applied transport theory from all parts of the world. As of 2024, there have been 27 meetings—none affiliated with any professional society—that were held in the United States, Italy, China, Brazil, Sweden, Russia, England, Hungary and France; Paul hosted six of the conferences in Blacksburg. The journal Transport Theory and Statistical Physics, or TTSP, with Paul as its founding editor from 1971 until 1981, has published the proceedings of many ICTT meetings; the journal was re-titled in 2014 to the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Transport in recognition of the growing popularity of numerical methods in transport theory. == Publications ==

Paul Zweifel published in a variety of professional and nonprofessional fields, especially in reactor physics and neutron scattering, transport theory, and statistical physics. whose dissertation was The Theory of Neutron Slowing Down in Nuclear Reactors. Later, the authors turned that into a book of the same title, and Paul wrote a textbook entitled Reactor Physics. == Honors ==

In 1972, he received from the United States Department of Energy the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. In 1974, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1963, and had an obituary published in Physics Today. == Later years ==

Paul Zweifel retired from Virginia Tech in 1996 but continued to publish professionally until 2014. he taught an opera course at Virginia Tech after his retirement. He also established a business specialized in creating supertitles for opera companies nationwide. He and his wife supported Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center and endowed a scholarship to enable music students to participate in summer music festivals and professional development workshops. He died on February 12, 2017, at the age of 87. == References ==