Hugh David Politzer (/ˈpɑːlɪtsər/; born August 31, 1949) is an American theoretical physicist. He is the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.[1] He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.[2] He was born in New York City.