Paul Houle

Paul Houle earned a PhD in theoretical physics in 1998 at Cornell University, pioneering a new way to do quantum mechanics. Up until then, quantum mechanical calculations were done in either position space or momentum space, with results that were confusing, unnatural, or ambiguous when linking classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. In his PhD thesis, he showed that calculations could be done in a manner that treats position and momentum equally; in future work, his thesis advisor's research group used this work to crack difficult problems in the science of "frustrated" systems that lack a single ground state.