About the Project
About the Project

Profile
William P. Reinhardt

Photograph of William P. Reinhardt

William P. Reinhardt (b. 1942 in San Francisco, California) is Professor of Chemistry and Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Washington, Seattle, currently Emeritus. His undergraduate and graduate degrees are from the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University, respectively. He is both an Associate Editor for Chemistry and a Senior Associate Editor for the DLMF. Reinhardt is a frequent visitor to the NIST Physics Laboratory in Gaithersburg, and to the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology (ISTP) at the University of Maryland. He currently resides in Santa Fe, NM.

Reinhardt is a theoretical chemist and atomic physicist, who has always been interested in orthogonal polynomials and in the analyticity properties of the functions of mathematical physics. He has recently carried out research on non-linear dynamics of Bose–Einstein condensates that served to motivate his interest in elliptic functions. Older work on the scattering theory of the atomic Coulomb problem led to the discovery of new classes of orthogonal polynomials relating to the spectral theory of Schrödinger operators, and new uses of old ones: this work was strongly motivated by his original ownership of a 1964 hard copy printing of the original AMS 55 NBS Handbook of Mathematical Functions.

Reinhardt firmly believes that the Mandelbrot set is a special function, and notes with interest that the natural boundaries of analyticity of many “more normal” special functions are also fractals. This is closely connected with his interests in classical dynamical “chaos,” an area where he coauthored a book, Chaos in atomic physics with Reinhold Blümel.

Reinhardt was elected to Fellowship in: The American Physical Society 1980, the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1983, Phi Beta Kappa 1998, and The Institute of Physics (UK) 2000. He has been a National Lecturer for Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa, as well as a Sloan, Dreyfus, and Guggenheim Fellow, and Fulbright Senior Scholar (Australia).

In his capacity as Associate Editor of the DLMF, Reinhardt is coauthor of the following DLMF Chapters

Reinhardt was a member of the original editorial committee for the DLMF project, in existence from the mid-1990’s to the mid-2010’s. During this time he served as Associate Editor with responsibilities for all aspects of the project. The original committee was reconstituted in 2015; for details see About the Project.

In November 2015, Reinhardt was named Senior Associate Editor of the DLMF and Associate Editor for Chapters 20, 22, and 23.