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Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions to string theory, topological quantum field theory, and various areas of mathematics. He is a professor emeritus in the school of at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetry, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Vaughan Jones invariants of knots as . He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.Duff 1998, p. 65
Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of 1968), and received his Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971.
He had aspirations in journalism and politics and published articles in both The New Republic and The Nation in the late 1960s. In 1972, he worked for six months on George McGovern's presidential campaign. Alt URL
Witten attended the University of Michigan for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out. He returned to academia, enrolling in applied mathematics at Princeton University in 1973, then shifting departments and receiving a PhD in physics in 1976 and completing a dissertation, "Some problems in the short distance analysis of gauge theories", under the supervision of David Gross. He was a National Radio Astronomy Observatory summer student (1974), held a fellowship at Harvard University (1976–77), visited Oxford University (1977–78), Interview by Hirosi Ooguri , Notices of the American Mathematical Society, May 2015, pp. 491–506. was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–1980), and held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).
In a written address to the ICM, Michael Atiyah said of Witten:
As an example of Witten's work in pure mathematics, Atiyah cites his application of techniques from quantum field theory to the mathematical subject of low-dimensional topology. In the late 1980s, Witten coined the term topological quantum field theory for a certain type of physical theory in which the expectation values of observable quantities encode information about the topology of spacetime. In particular, Witten realized that a physical theory now called Chern–Simons theory could provide a framework for understanding the mathematical theory of knots and 3-manifolds. Although Witten's work was based on the mathematically ill-defined notion of a Feynman path integral and therefore not mathematically rigorous, mathematicians were able to systematically develop Witten's ideas, leading to the theory of Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants.
Another result for which Witten was awarded the Fields Medal was his proof in 1981 of the positive energy theorem in general relativity. This theorem asserts that (under appropriate assumptions) the total energy of a gravitating system is always positive and can be zero only if the geometry of spacetime is that of flat Minkowski space. It establishes Minkowski space as a stable ground state of the gravitational field. While the original proof of this result due to Richard Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau used variational methods, Witten's proof used ideas from supergravity theory to simplify the argument.
A third area mentioned in Atiyah's address is Witten's work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, a branch of mathematics that studies the topology of manifolds using the concept of a differentiable function. Witten's work gave a physical proof of a classical result, the Morse inequalities, by interpreting the theory in terms of supersymmetric quantum mechanics.
Speaking at Strings '95 conference at University of Southern California, Witten made the surprising suggestion that these five string theories were in fact not distinct theories, but different limits of a single theory, which he called M-theory. Witten's proposal was based on the observation that the five string theories can be mapped to one another by certain rules called String duality and are identified by these dualities. It led to a flurry of work now known as the second superstring revolution.
In collaboration with Nathan Seiberg, Witten established several powerful results in quantum field theories. In their paper on string theory and noncommutative geometry, Seiberg and Witten studied certain noncommutative quantum field theories that arise as limits of string theory. In another well-known paper, they studied aspects of supersymmetric gauge theory. The latter paper, combined with Witten's earlier work on topological quantum field theory, led to developments in the topology of smooth manifold 4-manifolds, in particular the notion of Seiberg–Witten invariants.
With Anton Kapustin, Witten has made deep mathematical connections between S-duality of gauge theories and the geometric Langlands correspondence. Partly in collaboration with Seiberg, one of his recent interests includes aspects of field theoretical description of topological phases in condensed matter and non-supersymmetric dualities in field theories that, among other things, are of high relevance in condensed matter theory. In 2016, he has also brought tensor models to the relevance of holographic and quantum gravity theories, by using them as a generalization of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model.
Witten has published influential and insightful work in many aspects of quantum field theories and mathematical physics, including the physics and mathematics of anomalies, integrability, dualities, localization, and homologies. Many of his results have deeply influenced areas in theoretical physics (often well beyond the original context of his results), including string theory, quantum gravity and topological condensed matter. In particular, Witten is known for collaborating with Ruth Britto on a method calculating scattering amplitudes known as the BCFW recursion.
In an informal poll at a 1990 cosmology conference, Witten received the largest number of mentions as "the smartest living physicist"."At a 1990 conference on cosmology," wrote John Horgan in 2014, "I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, Jim Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist. Edward Witten got the most votes (with Steven Weinberg the runner-up). Some considered Witten to be in the same league as Einstein and Newton." See
Witten sits on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now and on the advisory council of J Street. He supports the two-state solution and advocates a boycott of Israeli institutions and economic activity beyond its 1967 borders, though not of Israel itself. Witten lived in Israel for a year in the 1960s.
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