Log24

Leo P. Kadanoff, a physicist who provided critical insights into the transformations of matter from one state to another, died last Monday in Chicago. He was 78.

The cause was respiratory failure, said the University of Chicago, where he was a professor from 1978 until his retirement in 2003.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

“He won basically every prize except the Nobel Prize, and many people thought he should have won the Nobel,” said Emil Martinec, a physics professor at the University of Chicago who directs the university’s Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics.

Dr. Kadanoff’s biggest scientific contribution came in the 1960s as scientists were trying to understand phase transitions, when matter changes from one form to another.

A Cornell chemist, Benjamin Widom, had come up with mathematical relationships that described behavior associated with second-order phase transitions, which include the boiling of water to steam at a particular temperature and pressure. But Dr. Widom did not have an underlying physical explanation for why these relationships existed.

Willis Carto, a reclusive behind-the-scenes wizard of the far-right fringe of American politics who used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust, died last Monday at his home in Virginia. He was 89.

His death was announced by The American Free Press, a newspaper he helped found.

Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust.

The Anti-Defamation League called him “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists” and “the mastermind of the hate network.”

His associates included neo-Nazis, Christian vigilantes, John Birch Society members and Ku Klux Klansmen, and his extreme views alienated mainstream conservatives. After William F. Buckley sued Mr. Carto for libel and won in 1985, Mr. Buckley said Mr. Carto epitomized “the fever swamps of the crazed right.’’