Martin Land

Martin Land was born in Brooklyn in 1953. He grew up in the New York City area, strongly influenced by his mother, a social worker who worked with Holocaust survivors, and his father, a second-generation engineer in small manufacturing businesses associated with the garment industry. In his school years he cleaned swimming pools and stables, worked as a carpenter on a construction site, and expedited orders in the garment center. In 1972, he entered Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he...See more

Martin Land was born in Brooklyn in 1953. He grew up in the New York City area, strongly influenced by his mother, a social worker who worked with Holocaust survivors, and his father, a second-generation engineer in small manufacturing businesses associated with the garment industry. In his school years he cleaned swimming pools and stables, worked as a carpenter on a construction site, and expedited orders in the garment center. In 1972, he entered Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he received a Kroll Fellowship for original research which permitted him to devote an extra year to extensive study in the humanities along with his specialization in physics. After completing his BA in 1977, he returned to New York City where he received an M.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1979 as a member of the Eta Kappa Nu engineering honor society. He joined Bell Laboratories, developing specialized hardware for fiber optic communication with application in computer networks and video transmission. In 1982, he worked as a telecommunications engineer at a major Wall Street bank. Returning to theoretical physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he worked with Eliezer Rabinovicci on supersymmetric quantum mechanics to receive a second M.S. in 1986. In 1985, he married Janet Baumgold, a feminist therapist and co-founder of the Counseling Center for Women. Following a year devoted to full-time fatherhood and another in compulsory national service, he began working toward a Ph.D. in high energy physics with Lawrence Horwitz at Tel Aviv University in 1988. He elaborated many aspects of the classical and quantum theories known as Stueckelberg-Horwitz-Piron (SHP) theory, producing a dissertation developing the SHP quantum field theory. Concurrently with his doctoral work, he was on the research faculty of the Computer Science Department at Hebrew University, developing specialized hardware for parallel computing. After submitting his dissertation in 1995, he taught communications engineering for three years at the Holon Institute of Technology, before joining the Department of Computer Science at Hadassah College in Jerusalem, teaching computer architecture, microprocessors, embedded systems, and computer networking. He was a founding member of the International Association for Relativistic Dynamics (IARD) in 1998 and has served as IARD president since 2006. In parallel to his activities in physics and computer science, he has enjoyed a long collaboration with Jonathan Boyarin of Cornell University in various areas of the humanities, critical theory, and Jewish studies. This collaboration has allowed him to communicate contemporary thinking in physics, especially notions of time associated with SHP theory, to scholars in other fields as modern context for philosophical consideration of temporality. See less