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David Hestenes
David Orlin Hestenes (born May 21, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.
For more than 30 years, he was employed in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Arizona State University (ASU), where he retired with the rank of research professor and is now emeritus.
David Orlin Hestenes (eldest son of mathematician Magnus Hestenes) was born 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. Beginning college as a pre-medical major at UCLA from 1950 to 1952, he graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 1954 with degrees in philosophy and speech. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, he entered UCLA as an unclassified graduate student, completed a physics M.A. in 1958 and won a University Fellowship. His mentor at UCLA was the physicist Robert Finkelstein, who was working on unified field theories at that time. A serendipitous encounter with lecture notes by mathematician Marcel Riesz inspired Hestenes to study a geometric interpretation of Dirac matrices. He obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA with a thesis entitled Geometric Calculus and Elementary Particles. Shortly thereafter he recognized that the Dirac algebras and Pauli matrices could be unified in matrix-free form by a device later called a spacetime split. Then he revised his thesis and published it in 1966 as a book, Space–Time Algebra, now referred to as spacetime algebra (STA). This was the first major step in developing a unified, coordinate-free geometric algebra and calculus for all of physics.
From 1964 to 1966, Hestenes was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton with John Archibald Wheeler. In 1966 he joined the physics department at Arizona State University, rising to full professor in 1976 and retiring in 2000 to Emeritus Professor of Physics.
In 1980 and 1981 as a NASA Faculty Fellow and in 1983 as a NASA Consultant he worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on orbital mechanics and attitude control, where he applied geometric algebra in development of new mathematical techniques published in a textbook/monograph New Foundations for Classical Mechanics.
In 1983 he joined with entrepreneur Robert Hecht-Nielsen and psychologist Peter Richard Killeen in conducting the first ever conference devoted exclusively to neural network modeling of the brain. In 1987, he became the first visiting scholar in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (Boston University) and worked on neuroscience research for a period.
Hestenes has been a principal investigator for NSF grants seeking to teach physics through modeling and to measure student understanding of physics models at both the high school and university levels.
Hestenes has worked in mathematical and theoretical physics, geometric algebra, neural networks, and cognitive research in science education. He is the prime mover behind the contemporary resurgence of interest in geometric algebras and in other offshoots of Clifford algebras as ways of formalizing theoretical physics.
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David Hestenes
David Orlin Hestenes (born May 21, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and science educator. He is best known as chief architect of geometric algebra as a unified language for mathematics and physics, and as founder of Modelling Instruction, a research-based program to reform K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.
For more than 30 years, he was employed in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Arizona State University (ASU), where he retired with the rank of research professor and is now emeritus.
David Orlin Hestenes (eldest son of mathematician Magnus Hestenes) was born 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. Beginning college as a pre-medical major at UCLA from 1950 to 1952, he graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 1954 with degrees in philosophy and speech. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, he entered UCLA as an unclassified graduate student, completed a physics M.A. in 1958 and won a University Fellowship. His mentor at UCLA was the physicist Robert Finkelstein, who was working on unified field theories at that time. A serendipitous encounter with lecture notes by mathematician Marcel Riesz inspired Hestenes to study a geometric interpretation of Dirac matrices. He obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA with a thesis entitled Geometric Calculus and Elementary Particles. Shortly thereafter he recognized that the Dirac algebras and Pauli matrices could be unified in matrix-free form by a device later called a spacetime split. Then he revised his thesis and published it in 1966 as a book, Space–Time Algebra, now referred to as spacetime algebra (STA). This was the first major step in developing a unified, coordinate-free geometric algebra and calculus for all of physics.
From 1964 to 1966, Hestenes was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton with John Archibald Wheeler. In 1966 he joined the physics department at Arizona State University, rising to full professor in 1976 and retiring in 2000 to Emeritus Professor of Physics.
In 1980 and 1981 as a NASA Faculty Fellow and in 1983 as a NASA Consultant he worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on orbital mechanics and attitude control, where he applied geometric algebra in development of new mathematical techniques published in a textbook/monograph New Foundations for Classical Mechanics.
In 1983 he joined with entrepreneur Robert Hecht-Nielsen and psychologist Peter Richard Killeen in conducting the first ever conference devoted exclusively to neural network modeling of the brain. In 1987, he became the first visiting scholar in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (Boston University) and worked on neuroscience research for a period.
Hestenes has been a principal investigator for NSF grants seeking to teach physics through modeling and to measure student understanding of physics models at both the high school and university levels.
Hestenes has worked in mathematical and theoretical physics, geometric algebra, neural networks, and cognitive research in science education. He is the prime mover behind the contemporary resurgence of interest in geometric algebras and in other offshoots of Clifford algebras as ways of formalizing theoretical physics.
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