Steven R. White (born December 26, 1959 in Lawton, Oklahoma) is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego; he then received his Ph.D. at Cornell University, where he was a shared student with Kenneth Wilson and John Wilkins. He is most known for inventing the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) in 1992. This is a numerical variational technique for high accuracy calculations of the low energy physics of quantum many-body systems. His over one hundred seventy papers on this and related subjects have been used and cited widely—his most cited article has received about four thousand citations.
National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship, 1982–1985Andrew D. White Supplementary Fellowship, 1982–1985IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1988–1989American Physical Society, Fellow, 1998American Physical Society, Division Councillor for Computational Physics, 1999American Physical Society Aneesur Rahman Prize, 2003Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008)Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016)Physical Review Letters Milestone Paper of 1992 (Honored 2008)Perimeter Distinguished Visiting Research Chair (2012-present)S.R., White, "Density Matrix Formulation for Quantum Renormalization Groups," Physical Review Letters 69, 2863 (1992). Cited 2416 times, according to Web of Science, October, 2014; over 4000 citations, according to Google Scholar, April, 2016.S.R., White, "Density Matrix Algorithms for Quantum Renormalization Groups," Physical Review B 48, 10345-10356 (1993). Cited 1598 times.N.E. Bickers, D.J. Scalapino, and S.R. White, "Conserving Approximations for Strongly Correlated Electron Systems: Bethe-Salpeter Equation and Dynamics for the Two-Dimensional Hubbard Mobel," Physical Review Letters, 62, 961 (1989). Cited 657 times.