T.J. Allen is a theoretical physicist and professor in the Physics Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has been a professor in the Mathematics and Science Department at the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome (now SUNY Polytechnic) and a research professor in the high energy theory group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His research interests are in string theory and quantum field theory, especially as applied to particle physics, condensed matter physics, and gravity. At Hobart and William Smith, SUNY IT, and the University of Wisconsin, he has taught several courses, from freshman physics to graduate level quantum mechanics.
Several graduate students at the University of Wisconsin have worked with Prof. Allen. One student who earned his Ph.D. for work on a project with him went on to a postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto and is now a professor in the University of Wisconsin System. Prof. Allen also guided an undergraduate in a research project on the numerical simulation of charged vortex gases, and started the high energy theory journal club, which he ran for many years. Some of the topics that Prof. Allen has worked on with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin are vortex dynamics and the fractional quantum Hall effect, BRST quantization of general relativity in Ashtekar's variables, T-duality in abelian theories, and string models of hybrid mesons.
Before going to Madison in 1991, Prof. Allen spent three years working in the High Energy Theory Group at Syracuse University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. While in Syracuse, he worked on problems related to string theory and black hole information loss with Mark Bowick and Amitabha Lahiri, and BRST quantization, quantum statistics and the fractional quantum Hall effect with A.P. Balachandran and his students. Here are some images of Syracuse University: The Quad, a winter scene, and the music building.
Prof. Allen obtained his Ph.D. with John Schwarz in the Particle Theory Group at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1988 for thesis work on the use of constrained quantization in point particle mechanics and string theory, especially the problem of quantizing the manifestly supersymmetric string and particle theories. He also worked with Ben Grinstein and Mark Wise on connecting quantum fluctuations in the early universe with non-Gaussian mass correlations in the present universe. Here are some pictures of Caltech: the Olive Walk, Millikan Library, and Lauritsen Lab, where the theory group is located on the fourth floor.
Prof. Allen was born and raised in Madison. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1978 until 1982, and received a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics, Engineering and Physics. As an undergraduate his interests were Lie groups, differential geometry, and their application to physics. His engineering interests were fluid mechanics and elasticity.
Some of Prof. Allen's other interestes are Aikido, calligraphy, electronic typesetting, and playing the piano. His TeX macropackage phyzzx.plus (a supplement to the Phyzzx macropackage) can be found in the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
Prof. Allen has become a bit too involved with computers. He was the system administrator of the Wisconsin High Energy Theory Group's NEXTSTEP cluster, and set up their Web site. He has lately migrated to Slackware on his MacBook Pro in addition to his desktop machines. Here are some of his very old links related to computing and physics.
