Edward Witten

Edward Witten (Baltimore, August 26, 1951) is an American physicist and mathematician. He has developed most of his scientific work at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He is owed great contributions to the theoretical physics of elementary particles, string theory and quantum field theory (especially in quantum chromodynamics).

Biography

She was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the son of Louis Witten, a physicist who specialized in gravitation and general relativity, and Lorena W. Witten. He graduated with a BA in history with a minor in linguistics from Brandeis University. Witten considered being a political journalist, publishing articles in The New Republic and The Nation. He worked briefly for George McGovern's presidential campaign, then went back to studying. He received his doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1976 under the supervision of David Gross. Later, he worked at Harvard University for the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow and at Princeton as a professor. He spent two years at Caltech, from 1999 to 2001. He is currently a professor of mathematical physics at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He married Chiara Nappi, a professor of physics at Princeton University. His brother, Matt Witten, is a writer and producer of several well-known television series such as L.A. Law and House

Witten's work combines theoretical physics with modern mathematics. His main works have been, above all, in quantum field theory and string theory, and in related areas of topology and geometry. Among his many contributions are his proof of the positivity of energy in the general theory of relativity, his work on supersymmetry, his introduction to quantum topological field theory and his work on mirror symmetry and gauge theory, and his conjecture on the existence of the theory M.

Witten was the first physicist to win the Fields Medal. An example of his impact on pure mathematics is offered by his work to understand the Jones polynomial by means of the Chern-Simons theory. This has had a great impact on geometric topology and led to quantum invariants being called Reshetikhin-Witten invariants.

In addition, Witten has exerted his influence on several mathematical problems that seemed unsolvable, due to some mathematicians have found that their seminal ideas and approaches stemmed from his ideas, which are usually shares in his geometry and analysis seminars at Princeton.

He is considered the main person responsible for the second revolution of string theory, now called superstring theory. The theory originally proposed the use of extended entities (strings) to model the behavior of the quantum world, but later some internal flaws appeared in it, such as tachyonic behavior, in addition to some physicists objecting because the theory was quantum mechanically consistent only if the number of dimensions was 26.

Then, in the 1980s, with some physicists, introducing the generalization known as supersymmetry groups, worked on the theory until it was consistent, reduced the dimensionality from 26 to 11 (10 spatial dimensions and one temporal), eliminated the tachyonic problem, and went from being a theory of strong interactions (since the strings were proposed by some curious results in the resolution of certain Feynman diagrams, which arise in quantum field theory) to be a theory that describes both quantum behavior and that of gravity (the sought after quantum gravity).

Books

• Michael B. Green, John H. Schwarz, Edward Witten (1988). Superstring Theory. Volume 1. Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521357524.
• Michael B. Green, John H. Schwarz, Edward Witten (1988). Superstring Theory. Volume 2. Loop Amplitudes, Anomalies and Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521357531.

Awards and Honors

• MacArthur Scholarship (1982)
• Member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of the United States of America (1984)
• Member of the Physics Society of the United States of America (1984).
• Albert Einstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society of Bern (1985)
• Dirac Prize (1985)
• Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1988)
• Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Brandeis (1988)
• Fields Medal (1990)
• Princeton University Madison Medal (1992)
• Doctor Honoris Causa of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1993).
• Member of the Philosophy Society of the United States of America (1994).
• Doctor Honoris Causa at Columbia University (1996).
• Oskar Klein Medal of the University of Stockholm (1998).
• Dannie Heineman Prize (1998).
• Frederic Esser Nemmers Award in Mathematics (2000).
• Member of the French Academy of Sciences (2000).
• United States National Medal of Science (2003).
• He appeared on the list of the hundred most influential Time people in 2004.
• Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Southern California (2004).
• Doctor Honoris Causa by Johns Hopkins University (2005).
• Doctor Honoris Causa at Harvard University (2005).
• Pitagora Award (2005)
• Honorary Doctor of Science at Cambridge University (2006).
• Henri Poincaré Prize (2006).
• Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006). Named by Pope Benedict XVI.
• Albert Einstein World Science Award awarded by the World Cultural Council (2016)

Curiosities

• Witten has the highest h index of living physicists, marking 100 points
• Witten was mentioned in the episode Mars University of the Futurama series in 1999.