Kenneth Wilson, at Cornell University, publishes in 1971 two consecutive papers in Physical Review B titled "Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena" (parts I and II). In the first, he recasts Kadanoff's scaling theory (1966) in differential form: he converts the discrete "block spin" transformation into a set of renormalization-group differential equations describing how a physical system's parameters change as the observational scale varies continuously. Wilson shows that the Widom-Kadanoff scaling laws emerge naturally from these equations if the coefficients are analytic at the critical point, and further considers a generalization incorporating an "irrelevant" variable: in that case, the scaling laws only hold if the equations' solution converges asymptotically to a fixed point. The second paper carries out a cell analysis in the phase space of critical behavior. Together, these two works turn an intuitive physical idea — Kadanoff's spin blocks — into a rigorous, generally applicable calculation method, capable of precisely predicting the critical exponents of very diverse physical systems from first principles. Wilson extends the method the following year together with Michael Fisher ("Critical Exponents in 3.99 Dimensions", Phys. Rev. Lett. 28, 240, 1972), introducing the celebrated "epsilon expansion" around the critical dimension 4, and publishes in 1975 an exhaustive review in Reviews of Modern Physics. The method's scope turns out to be far greater than the original problem of critical phenomena: it becomes a fundamental tool also in quantum field theory (renormalization of strong interactions) and in quantum magnetic-impurity systems. For this work, Wilson receives the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics alone — without sharing it with Kadanoff or Fisher, unlike the 1980 Wolf Prize, which was shared among the three.