Robert Jay Finkelstein (March 26, 1916 – August 27, 2020) was an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics.
[2] After completing his last doctoral examination, he went to Washington, DC to join Francis Bitter’s research group in the Navy Department.
He found an analytic solution to a shockwave problem that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar had previously solved numerically and also co-authored with George Gamow the paper Theory of the Detonation Process.
[3]As a postdoc Finkelstein was at the University of Chicago and then spent the academic year 1947–1948[4] at the Institute for Advanced Study as part of a research group (including H. Lewis, S. Wouthuysen, and L. Foldy) under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer.
More recently he has developed a model for elementary particles based on "q-deformations" of the Lorentz group and knot theory.