Norman Howard Christ (/ˈkrɪst/; born 22 December 1943 in Pittsburgh) is a physicist and professor at Columbia University, where he holds the Ephraim Gildor Professorship of Computational Theoretical Physics.
Norman's research lies in the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics, simulating the strong interaction among quarks and gluons with Monte Carlo methods.
He has worked on various topics in this field, such as the phenomenon of quark confinement, the spontaneous chiral magnetization of the vacuum, and the quark-gluon plasma.
Norman and his collaborators won the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 1998 for designing the QCDSP supercomputer.
After QCDOC, although Norman still collaborated closely with IBM in developing the Blue Gene supercomputers, he was no longer playing a leading role in these projects.