---
id: people/david-pines
about:
  label: David Pines
  description: >-
    Condensed-matter physicist and advocate of emergence who helped found the
    Santa Fe Institute, recruiting Murray Gell-Mann and organising its 1984
    founding workshops.
  tags:
    - emergence
    - complexity
    - history
    - physics
person:
  affiliation: Santa Fe Institute
  role: theoretical physicist
relations:
  - predicate: member_of
    target: organizations/santa-fe-institute
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'In memoriam: David Pines (Santa Fe Institute, 2018)'
      url: 'https://santafe.edu/news-center/news/memoriam-david-pines'
    - title: David Pines (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pines'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
David Pines (8 June 1924 to 3 May 2018) was an American theoretical physicist who worked on the many-body problems of condensed matter and nuclear physics.[^1,2] In a 1950 paper with David Bohm at Princeton he set out the random phase approximation, which reduces the problem of many strongly interacting electrons to an effective single-body problem; a colleague says it has affected almost every field of physics.[^1] Working with John Bardeen at the University of Illinois, he showed in 1954 that phonons, the vibrations of a crystal lattice, can make some electrons attract each other. That Bardeen-Pines interaction is the mechanism behind the Cooper pairing of BCS superconductivity.[^1,2] He spent most of his career at Urbana-Champaign and was the founding director of its Center for Advanced Study.[^1] The University of California's Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter had him as its founding co-director.[^1] He argued for describing the properties that arise from the behaviour of a system's components as emergence.[^1]

As an adviser to Los Alamos he was among the senior scientists [George Cowan](/people/george-cowan/) convened in the early 1980s to plan a new interdisciplinary institute. He recruited Philip Anderson and his close friend [Murray Gell-Mann](/people/murray-gell-mann/), drew on his contacts for early funding, and co-organised the 1984 founding workshops, published as *Emerging Syntheses in Science*.[^1] He served the Santa Fe Institute as vice president, chair of the board of trustees and co-chair of the science board.[^1] With Anderson and Kenneth Arrow he edited *The Economy as a Complex Evolving System*, from the Santa Fe meetings on complexity economics that became SFI's first funded research programme.[^1] At his death he was SFI's co-founder in residence.[^1]

He appears in the [Santa Fe Institute](/organizations/santa-fe-institute/) entry's account of the founding.