He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism.

Some of his PhD students include H. R. Krishnamurthy, Roman Jackiw, Michael Peskin, Serge Rudaz, Paul Ginsparg, and Steven R.

[1] Wilson's brother David was also a professor at Cornell in the department of Molecular Biology and Genetics until his death,[8] and his wife since 1982, Alison Brown, is a prominent computer scientist.

He devised a universal "divide-and-conquer" strategy for calculating how phase transitions occur, by considering each scale separately and then abstracting the connection between contiguous ones, in a novel appreciation of renormalization group theory.

This provided profound insights into the field of critical phenomena and phase transitions in statistical physics enabling precise calculations.

[16] He extended these insights on scaling to answer fundamental questions on the nature of quantum field theory and the operator product expansion[17] and the physical meaning of the renormalization group.

[18] He also pioneered the understanding of the confinement of quarks inside hadrons,[19] utilizing lattice gauge theory, and initiating an approach permitting formerly foreboding strong-coupling calculations on computers.