Public Biography
Dr. Rolf Ekelund is a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and the most austere practitioner of artisanal thinking yet identified in the physical sciences. He does not use a computer, a collaborator or any result he has not obtained himself, and he will not accept a problem that cannot be solved by one person, at a desk, with a pencil, in what he calls “a human amount of time.”
Dr. Ekelund received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1991 and joined the Caltech faculty in 1996. For most of his career he was a computational physicist who studied the behavior of electrons in disordered materials and ran simulations on some of the largest machines then available. In 2018 a numerical result that had occupied his group for three years was reproduced in an afternoon by a graduate student in Lausanne using different software, an event he has described as the moment he understood “that neither of us had understood it. The machine had understood it. We had been in the room.” He published the result, withdrew from the collaboration, had the computer removed from his office and bought a box of pencils. The Ethernet jack in the office is covered with a square of masking tape. He has published nothing since.
Since 2020 he has maintained a green clothbound ledger listing every result in the history of physics that he judges to have been obtained by a single person working alone with pencil and paper, together with its date and, where he could establish it, the time it took. The entries thicken through the 1920s, a decade he calls “the harvest,” and stop in 1930, with the derivation of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star by a nineteen-year-old aboard a steamship between Bombay and Venice. “After that,” he has said, “you needed a cyclotron.” He has rulings on every proposed later entry: Bell’s theorem is mathematics, and Hawking radiation relied on a framework its author did not obtain himself. He is the only member of the appeals panel.
He solves the hydrogen atom most mornings, “to keep the hands in,” and had done so 212 times as of October 2026, each solution signed, dated and filed in a drawer. He reads the primary literature in print and receives the newsletter of the artisanal-thinking movement, The Unassisted, by mail. He has written to the American Physical Society to ask whether any easy problems remain and received a reply that referred him to a website. He has one graduate student, Wendy Oyelaran, for whom he has been seeking a thesis problem “her size” since 2022.
The most recent line in the ledger, undated and in pencil, is a problem he has set for himself: to determine, from first principles and by hand, whether any easy problem remains. He expects it to take several years.
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — subject; the ledger, the 212 hydrogen atoms and the lament
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”