Rolf Landauer, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Rolf Landauer

American-German physicist, engineer

Date of Birth: 04-Feb-1927

Place of Birth: Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Date of Death: 28-Apr-1999

Profession: engineer, computer scientist, physicist

Nationality: United States, Germany

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 28, 1999) was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media.
In 1961 he discovered Landauer's principle, that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat.
This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing.
He also is responsible for the Landauer formula relating the electrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties.
He won the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and the IEEE Edison Medal, among many other honors.