Anthony Zee

Anthony Zee (, b. 1945) (Zee comes from /ʑi23/, the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist, writer, and a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Early Life and Education
Zee was born in Kunming, China, in 1945, but his family fled to Hong Kong just before the Cultural Revolution, when he was four years old. His father was a self-taught businessman, and after a few years in Hong Kong, during a slump in business, decided to move the family again, this time to Brazil. The family settled in Sao Paolo, where Zee attended an American international high school before immigrating to the US in 1962 to attend Princeton University, where he worked with physicist John Wheeler. After graduating from Princeton University, Zee obtained his PhD from Harvard University, where he focused on group theory in physics, supervised by Sidney Coleman. He graduated in 1970 and went on to complete a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would later return to the Institute from 1977-78 during a sabbatical year while on faculty at Princeton.

Career
After completing his postdoctoral studies, Zee accepted an assistant professorship at Rockefeller University in New York in 1972. He only stayed a year before returning to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1973. In his first year back at Princeton, Zee had Ed Witten as his teaching assistant and grader. However, Zee was denied tenure in 1978, so he moved to the University of Pennsylvania for two years. From there he went to the University of Washington before settling at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1985. At UCSB, Zee teaches courses on both general relativity and quantum field theory. The culmination of his teaching is his highly regarded and widely praised "trilogy" of graduate level textbooks: Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell, and Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. He is also the author of several books for general readers about physics and Chinese culture.

Research
Zee specializes in theoretical physics; research interests include high energy physics, field theory, cosmology, biophysics, condensed matter physics, and mathematical physics. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications and several books on particle physics, condensed matter physics, anomalies in physics, random matrix theory, superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and other topics in theoretical physics and evolutionary biology, as well as their various interrelations.

Books
Technical: General readers:
 * 1982. Unity of Forces in the Universe. Singapore: World Scientific.
 * 2010. Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691140346
 * 2013. Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691145587
 * 2016. Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691162690
 * 2020.
 * 1989. An Old Man's Toy, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-02-633440-2
 * 1990. Swallowing Clouds. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-671-74724-4
 * 2007. Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press. Foreword by Roger Penrose. ISBN 978-0-691-00946-9. 1986 1st ed. published by Macmillan; 2016 pbk edition published by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-17326-9
 * 2018.
 * 2023.

Awards and Honors

 * Institute for Advanced Study Dyson Distinguished Visiting Professor
 * Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship – 1973
 * Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship – 2006-2007
 * Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation Humboldt Research Award – 2011
 * Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – 2014
 * Fellow of American Physical Society (APS) - 2014