Robert Mills, American physicist and academic (d. 1999)
Robert Laurence Mills (April 15, 1927 – October 27, 1999) was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Chen-Ning Yang and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics."Mathematically, Yang and Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang–Mills fields (this equation reduces to Maxwell's equations as a special case; see gauge theory):









∂



μ







F



μ

ν





+

2

ϵ

(



b



μ





×



F



μ

ν





)

=



J



ν









{\displaystyle \partial _{\mu }F^{\mu \nu }+2\epsilon (b_{\mu }\times F^{\mu \nu })=J^{\nu }}

.