The 2018 Reynolds lecture speaker was Prof Andrew Millis, a Professor of Physics at Columbia University and a co-Director of Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. Dr. Millis’s research focus is theoretical condensed matter physics. He is the leading authority in theory of correlated materials, application of new theoretical ideas to actual experiments on novel materials including high temperature superconductors. His theory of ‘colossal’ magnetoresistance seen in manganites has been the key theoretical advance that enabled a complete understanding of these materials. Andrew has also been working on quasi one-dimensional conductors and heavy fermion compounds. The lecture, entitled “Meeting Dirac’s challenge: from quantum entanglement to materials theory” presented a broad-stroke account of developments in humankind’s capability of explaining and predicting materials properties through advanced computational approaches.

Dirac wrote 90 years ago: “The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.’’ Professor Millis described the development of the new computational tools to meet the challenge laid out by Dirac in our quest for effective predictive tools for quantum materials. Center for Computational Quantum Physics, The Flatiron Institute is superbly positioned to address this challenge. The lecture was held on March 15 2019 and was well attended with a large number of undergraduate and graduate students present.

Contributed by Alexander Balatsky, edited by Jason Hancock

---