Magic, Mystery, and Matrix Edward Witten

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Magic, Mystery, and Matrix Edward Witten

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mmm Magic, Mystery, and Matrix Edward Witten

Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Witten is a leading researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics. He is regarded by some of his peers as one of the greatest living physicists, perhaps even a successor to Albert Einstein.^[1]

He has also made seminal contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics, which is the highest honor in mathematics and often regarded as the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics. He is the only physicist to have received this honor.

Birth and education

Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland to a Jewish family, attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of ’68), the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity. Witten had a very unusual background. Witten planned to become a political journalist, and published articles in The New Republic and The Nation. In 1968 Witten at the mere age of seventeen published an article in The Nation arguing that the New Left had no strategy. Witten went on to receive his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon. He held a fellowship at Harvard University (1976–77), was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–80), and held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).

Witten attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out. He then returned to academia, enrolling in applied mathematics at Princeton University before shifting departments and receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1976 under David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate in Physics.

[edit] Academic career

After completing his Ph.D., he worked at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow and at Princeton as a professor. He was a Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. He also was briefly at Caltech for two years from 1999 to 2001. He is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Witten has the highest h-index (144) of any living physicist.^[2]^[3]

[edit] Research and seminal works

Witten has made extensive contributions to theoretical physics, in work that has spawned a large number of highly mathematical results. He has more than 350 publications primarily in quantum field theory and string theory and in related areas of topology and geometry. Witten is widely regarded by his peers to be one of the most important theoretical physicists in the last century. While it is difficult to categorize his deep and very influential work in certain terms, on the physics side Witten focuses on supersymmetry and on the mathematical side a lot of his work is on ideas of topology. Witten has shown through his various pioneering contributions that these things are related in a deep way at a fundamental level.

One of Witten’s early contributions in physics is a natural solution to the so called hierarchy problem. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts a particle known as Higgs Boson. Its mass however seems much lighter than what the Model predicts. Witten has shown that the mechanism of broken supersymmetry offers a natural explanation to the hierarchy problem. In supersymmetry theory, the Witten Index tells whether supersymmetry is broken or not. Witten went on to make seminal contributions in supersymmetric gauge theories. Along with Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies Witten developed what is now known as Seiberg-Witten Theory which is related to Donaldson theory in mathematics.

Witten is clearly the leading figure in the development of string theory which is a leading candidate for the theory of all the forces in nature. Even as early as 1984, Witten worked on an important problem of gravitational anomaly which paved the way to what is known as the first string theory revolution. Also, with Gary Horowitz, Philip Candelas and Andy Strominger Witten showed how string theory can lead to realistic descriptions by compactifying the theory on a higher dimensional manifold known as Calabi Yau manifolds. In the string theory conference at University of Southern California in the mid-’90s, Witten dazzled the conference by solving a major outstanding problem of how five different versions of string theory were just the same theory which are related to one another by dualities. Also, Witten conjectured the existence of a unifying theory called M-theory whose complete structures had not been discovered yet and non-technically could be described as what could be possibly the most fundamental physical theory of the universe. Stephen Hawking, in his book The Grand Design, wrote that M-theory may be the ultimate theory of the universe.

Edward Witten’s other important contribution to physics was to a relatively recent result of gauge gravity duality. In 1997, Juan Maldacena formulated an important result establishing a relationship between gauge theories and a certain theory of gravity commonly known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This revolutionary discovery has dominated theoretical physics for the past 15 years and Witten’s work following Maldacena’s insight has shed extremely important light on this very important relationship. His many other contributions include a simplified proof of the positive energy theorem involving spinors in general relativity, his work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, his introduction of topological quantum field theory and related work on mirror symmetry, knot theory, twistor theory and D-branes and their intersections.

Witten was awarded the Fields Medal^[4]^[5] by the International Mathematical Union in 1990, becoming the first physicist to win the prize. Sir Michael Atiyah said of Witten, “Although he is definitely a physicist, his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians… Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems… he has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics.”^[6] One such example of his impact on pure mathematics is his framework for understanding the Jones polynomial using Chern–Simons theory. This had far reaching implications on low-dimensional topology and led to quantum invariants such as the Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants.

Witten has been described as “the most brilliant physicist of his generation”,^[7] and “one of the world’s greatest living physicists, perhaps even Einstein’s successor”.^[8] In 1995, he suggested the existence of M-theory at a conference at the University of Southern California and used it to explain a number of previously observed dualities sparking a flurry of new research in string theory called the second superstring revolution.

[edit] Personal life

Witten is married to Chiara Nappi, a professor of physics at Princeton University. They have two daughters, Ilana and Daniela, and one son, Raphael (Rafi), and a granddaughter Nava. His brother, Matt Witten, is a screenwriter and producer for several popular TV series including Law & Order and House. Edward Witten serves on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now.

[edit] Awards and honors

Witten has been honored with numerous awards including a MacArthur Grant (1982), the Fields Medal (1990), the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2000), the National Medal of Science^[9] (2002), Pythagoras Award^[10] (2005), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2006), the Crafoord Prize (2008), the Lorentz Medal (2010) and the Isaac Newton Medal (2010). Pope Benedict XVI appointed Witten as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006). He also appeared in the list of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2004.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ K. C. Cole (October 18, 1987 (1987-10-18)). “A Theory of Everything”. The New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/18/magazine/a-theory-of-everything.html.
^ Philip Ball, Index aims for fair ranking of scientists, Nature 436, 900 (18 August 2005)
^ The H-Index: The Hot Topic in Information Science, Times Higher Education, 13 March 2008
^ “On the work of Edward Witten” (when being awarded the Field’s medal)
^ National Medal of Science Awarded to Institute for Advanced Study Physicist Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study announcement, 22 October 2003
^ Atiyah, Michael (2005). Michael Atiyah: Collected Works: Volume 6. Oxford Science Publications. pp. 209, 212. ISBN 978-0198530992.
^ The Man Who Led the Second Superstring Revolution, Discover Magazine, 13 November 2008
^ The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th Dimension, PBS NOVA transcript
^ “Edward Witten”, The President’s National Medal of Science: Recipient Details.
^ “Il premio Pitagora al fisico teorico Witten” (in Italian). Il Crotonese. September 23, 2005 (2005-09-23). http://www.ilcrotonese.it/notizia.asp?IDNotizia=10957&IDCategoria=8.

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