About Robert Mills (physicist)
Robert Laurence Mills (April 15, 1927 – October 27, 1999) was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, C.N. Yang and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics." Mathematically, Yang and Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang–Mills fields (this equation reduces to Maxwell's equations as a special case; see gauge theory): ∂ μ F μ ν + 2 ϵ ( b μ × F μ ν ) = J ν {\displaystyle \partial _{\mu }F^{\mu \nu }+2\epsilon (b_{\mu }\times F^{\mu \nu })=J^{\nu }}. Mills demonstrated his mathematical ability by becoming a Putnam Fellow in 1948, and by receiving first-class honors in the Tripos.
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