SACO (AP) — Kenneth Wilson, a physicist who earned a Nobel prize for pioneering work that changed the way physicists think about phase transitions, has died in Maine. He was 77.

Wilson, who died from complications of lymphoma, was in the physics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for applying his research in quantum physics to phase transitions, the transformation that occurs when a substance goes from, say, liquid to gas. Wilson created a mathematical tool called the renormalization group that is still used in physics.

The son of a Harvard chemist, the Waltham, Mass., native joined Cornell University in 1963 and later retired from Ohio State University, where he founded the Physics Education Research Group.