Wes Mathews

Wes Mathews

Associate Professor

524 Reiss Science Building
Telephone: (202) 687-5981
E-mail: mathews@georgetown.edu
Website: http://site.physics.georgetown.edu/~mathews

Wesley N. Mathews Jr. received a B.A. in Physics from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) in 1958. He did his graduate work at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), where he was an NSF Fellow. He received an M.S. in Physics in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1966. He did postdoctoral work at Case Western University during 1966-68 and joined the Georgetown University Faculty in 1968.

While at Georgetown University, Dr. Mathews has supervised two M.S. students and six Ph.D. students and has been a PI on three NSF grants. He has also serves as a referee for American Journal of Physics. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the National Space Society, the Planetary Society, and the World Future Society. He is also the Georgetown University representative to the Universities Space Research Association.

Current Research

His research interests are wide-ranging. His most recent publication is in special relativity. He is currently working on a problem in statistical mechanics. He has done work in superconductivity, currently has a project in spatially inhomogeneous superconducting systems, and pays attention to developments in high-temperature superconductivity. He has a long-standing interest in nonrelativistic quantum field theory, particularly as applied to nonequilibrium systems. He also is working on various problems in mathematical physics and classical mechanics. He has long been an amateur astronomer, which has led to some ongoing work in celestial mechanics.

 

Selected Publications

  1. W. N. Mathews Jr., Relativistic velocity and acceleration transformations from thought experiments, Am. J. Phys. 73, 45 (2005).
  2. W. A. Raine and W. N. Mathews Jr., Quasiparticle energies for a two-band interlayer coupling model of a high-Tc superconductor, Phys. Rev. B 47, 422 (1993).
  3. W. N. Mathews Jr., Comment on “One-body and two-body operators on systems of identical particles”, Am. J. Phys. 58, 692 (1990).
  4. W. N. Mathews Jr., Superposition and energy conservation for small amplitude mechanical waves, Am. J. Phys. 54, 233 (1986).
  5. W. N. Mathews Jr., Energy in one-dimensional small amplitude mechanical waves, Am. J. Phys. 53, 974 (1985).
  6. W. N. Mathews Jr. and M. A. Esrick, Locality of the field operators of many-body theory, Am. J. Phys. 48, 782 (1980).
  7. W. N. Mathews Jr., Quasiparticle, Charge, and Energy Conservation in Weak-Coupling Superconductors, phys. Stat. Solidi (b) 90, 327 (1978).