Lawrence S. Schulman (born 1941) is an American-Israeli physicist known for his work on path integrals, quantum measurement theory and statistical mechanics.
He introduced topology into path integrals on multiply connected spaces and has contributed to diverse areas from galactic morphology to the arrow of time.
After completing his thesis he took a position as Assistant Professor at Indiana University (Bloomington), but in 1970 went to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa on a NATO postdoctoral fellowship.
In 1985, he returned to the United States as Chair of the Physics Department of Clarkson University and eventually (1988) also resigned from the Technion as a full professor.
Together with Phil Seiden of IBM, he began the first studies of randomized cellular automata,[1] an area that morphed into a theory of star formation in galaxies, once they were joined by Humberto Gerola (an astrophysicist at IBM) who realized that star formation regions - as well as epidemic models- could be viewed as random cellular automata.
[2] Besides providing an explanation for spiral arms, this work ultimately solved the mystery of why dwarf galaxies can vary in their luminosity by large factors.
[6] Schulman lowered his Erdös number to two by collaborating with Mark Kac and others on Feynman's checkerboard path integral,[7][8] realizing that a particle only acquires mass by scattering, reversing its speed-of-light propagation.
Together with Bernard Gaveau (University of Paris VI) Schulman developed an embedding of a stochastic dynamical system in low dimensional Euclidean space, known as the "observable representation."