Peter Kramer (physicist)

Kramer studied physics at the University of Münster, the University of Tübingen, the University of Bristol and the University of Marburg. He received his PhD in 1964 in Marburg and in 1968 his Habilitation in Tübingen. He was a postdoc at the UNAM in Mexico City, where he collaborated with Marcos Moshinsky. He was a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tübingen from 1970 until 1998 when he retired. He has also served as a Dean and a Vice President at the University of Tübingen. Kramer married in 1962 and has two children.

Kramer's work is concerned with applications of groups and representations in mathematical physics. His early work was in nuclear physics. In the early eighties he and his student Roberto Neri developed a mathematical model for quasiperiodic tesselations of three-dimensional space. Their paper was submitted in 1983 and published in 1984,^[1] a few months before Dan Shechtman and his co-workers announced the experimental discovery of an alloy with icosahedral quasi-crystalline structure.^[2][3] Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work.

In later years, Kramer became interested in cosmology and three-dimensional space forms. His scientific œuvre contains more than 200 publications.^[4]