Prof Fumiko Yonezawa, Theoretical physicist

Fumiko Yonezawa was a theoretical physicist who studied amorphous materials, semiconductors and liquid metals.

Sep 14, 2023

Born in 1938, Fumiko Yonezawa, 米沢富美子, was a theoretical physicist who studied amorphous materials, semiconductors and liquid metals.

Her career began when she studied amorphous materials, or glasses, as part of her doctorate at Kyoto University in the mid-1960s. She developed the Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA), a method for calculating physical characteristics, such as density or resistivity, of amorphous materials.

Later, at Keio University, Yonezawa and her team studied how, at an atomic level, liquids become crystals or amorphous solids, using computational models. She spent some time at City College of New York, returning to Japan in 1981. In the 1990s, she developed a “theory of metal-insulator transition in liquid selenium” and became interested in neural networks.

In 1984, she was awarded the Saruhashi Prize, which is awarded to Japanese women for research in the natural sciences, for her “Theory of Fundamental Physical Properties of Amorphous Materials”. She was the first woman to become President of the Physics Society of Japan in 1996 and, in 2005, she won a L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science for “pioneering theory and computer simulations on amorphous semiconductors and liquid metals.”

In 2020, the Physical Society of Japan launched the Fumiko Yonezawa Memorial Award to “honor and encourage” female members of the society, presenting awards to five women in physics in Japan.

Fumiko Yonezawa died on 17 January 2019, aged 80.