John Morgan Greene (22 September 1928 – 22 October 2007) was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for his work on solitons and plasma physics.[2][3][4][5]
Education
After several successes as a high school student in the state mathematical competitions of Kansas, he received a Pepsi Cola scholarship at Caltech, where he earned a B. S. in 1950. In 1956 he received a PhD from the University of Rochester in nuclear physics under David Feldman[citation needed] with a thesis entitled "High-Order Corrections to the Nucleon-Nucleon Potential in Change-Symmetric Pseudoscalar Theory."[1]
He was the author of a series of works with John Johnson and Katherine Weimer on equilibria and instabilities in Tokamak and Stellarator plasmas in magnetohydrodynamics. With Johnson and Ray Grimm he developed the computer program PEST (Princeton Equilibrium and Stability in Tokamak's Code). With Bruno Coppi and others he investigated dissipative instabilities in plasmas. With Ira B. Bernstein and Martin Kruskal he did research on BGK modes (nonlinear wave solutions in plasma physics). In the 1970s he worked on Hamiltonian dynamics in chaos theory. In 1979 he published Greene's criterion for the collapse of tori in KAM theory.
He was married from 1956 on and had a daughter and two grandchildren. He died as a consequence of Parkinson's disease. Greene's father was a professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State.
