Kenneth Alan Johnson

Kenneth Alan Johnson (March 26, 1931 in Duluth, Minnesota – February 9, 1999 in Boston, Massachusetts) was an American theoretical physicist.  He was Professor of Physics at MIT, a leader in the study of quantum field theories and the quark substructure of matter.   Johnson contributed to the understanding of symmetry and anomalies in quantum field theories and to models of quark confinement and dynamics in quantum chromodynamics.^[1]

Biography[]

Early life[]

Ken Johnson was a student at Case Western Reserve University and obtained his bachelor's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1952.  He studied theoretical physics at Harvard University, completing his Ph. D. under the direction of Julian Schwinger in 1955.^[2]   Johnson remained at Harvard as a Research Fellow and Lecturer from 1955 through 1957 and during 1957-1958 he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (Niels Bohr Institute), Copenhagen.^[1]

Career at MIT[]

Johnson was appointed to the MIT faculty in 1958 as Assistant Professor, promoted to Associate Professor in 1961, and to Full Professor in 1965.  Johnson remained at MIT, with the exception of visiting positions at SLAC (1971–72, 1980–81), University of Washington (1972), and Nordita (1981), for the remainder of his career.^{[citation needed]}

Early in his career, Johnson together with Marshall Baker (University of Washington) undertook a systematic study of the short distance and high energy behavior of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which presaged modern studies of renormalization group flow and the search for ultraviolet fixed points of the QED