Giovanni Felder | |
---|---|
![]() Giovanni Felder in 2013 | |
Born | 18 November 1958 Aarau, Switzerland |
Alma mater | ETH Zürich |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematical Physics |
Institutions | ETH Zürich |
Thesis | Renormalization Group, Tree Expansion, and Non-renormalizable Quantum Field Theories (1986) |
Doctoral advisor | Jürg Martin Fröhlich |
Doctoral students | Thomas Willwacher |
Website | https://people.math.ethz.ch/~felder/ |
Giovanni Felder (18 November 1958 in Aarau) is a Swiss mathematical physicist and mathematician, working at ETH Zurich. He specializes in algebraic and geometric properties of integrable models of statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. [1]
Felder attended school in Lugano and Willisau District. He studied physics at ETH Zurich, where he graduated with M.Sc. in 1982 and with Ph.D. in 1986. [2] His doctoral dissertation, entitled Renormalization Group, Tree Expansion, and Non-renormalizable Quantum Field Theories, was supervised by Jürg Fröhlich (and Konrad Osterwalder). [3]
Felder held postdoctoral positions from 1986 to 1988 at IHES, from 1988 to 1989 at the Institute for Advanced Study, [2] and from 1989 to 1991 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich.
From 1991 to 1994 he became an assistant professor of mathematics at ETH Zurich. From 1994 to 1996 he worked as professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina. In 1996 he returned at ETH Zurich as professor of mathematics. [4] From 2013 to 2019, he was the director of the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich. [5]
In 1994 Felder was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. [6] He was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2012 [4] and fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. [7]
Felder's research involves mathematical problems motivated by physical ideas.
In the late 1980s Felder did research with Krzysztof Gawedzki and Antti Kupiainen on the geometry of the Wess-Zumino-Witten model in conformal field theory. [8] [9] In 1989 he introduced a BRST approach to the "minimal two-dimensional conformal invariant models of Belavin, Polyakov and Zamolodchikov." [10]
With Alexander Varchenko and Vitaly Tarasov, Felder did research on various integrable models [11] in quantum field theory and statistical mechanics and resulting special functions (such as the elliptic gamma function, [12] elliptic quantum groups, [13] and elliptic Macdonald polynomials). [14]
With Alberto Cattaneo in 2000 he gave a path integral interpretation of Kontsevich's deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds [15] as well as a description of the symplectic groupoid integrating a Poisson manifold as an infinite-dimensional symplectic quotient. [16]
He supervised 22 doctoral students as of 2022, including Thomas Willwacher. [3]
In physics, quantisation is the systematic transition procedure from a classical understanding of physical phenomena to a newer understanding known as quantum mechanics. It is a procedure for constructing quantum mechanics from classical mechanics. A generalization involving infinite degrees of freedom is field quantization, as in the "quantization of the electromagnetic field", referring to photons as field "quanta". This procedure is basic to theories of atomic physics, chemistry, particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum optics.
String field theory (SFT) is a formalism in string theory in which the dynamics of relativistic strings is reformulated in the language of quantum field theory. This is accomplished at the level of perturbation theory by finding a collection of vertices for joining and splitting strings, as well as string propagators, that give a Feynman diagram-like expansion for string scattering amplitudes. In most string field theories, this expansion is encoded by a classical action found by second-quantizing the free string and adding interaction terms. As is usually the case in second quantization, a classical field configuration of the second-quantized theory is given by a wave function in the original theory. In the case of string field theory, this implies that a classical configuration, usually called the string field, is given by an element of the free string Fock space.
The Chern–Simons theory is a 3-dimensional topological quantum field theory of Schwarz type developed by Edward Witten. It was discovered first by mathematical physicist Albert Schwarz. It is named after mathematicians Shiing-Shen Chern and James Harris Simons, who introduced the Chern–Simons 3-form. In the Chern–Simons theory, the action is proportional to the integral of the Chern–Simons 3-form.
In mathematical physics, geometric quantization is a mathematical approach to defining a quantum theory corresponding to a given classical theory. It attempts to carry out quantization, for which there is in general no exact recipe, in such a way that certain analogies between the classical theory and the quantum theory remain manifest. For example, the similarity between the Heisenberg equation in the Heisenberg picture of quantum mechanics and the Hamilton equation in classical physics should be built in.
In theoretical physics and mathematics, a Wess–Zumino–Witten (WZW) model, also called a Wess–Zumino–Novikov–Witten model, is a type of two-dimensional conformal field theory named after Julius Wess, Bruno Zumino, Sergei Novikov and Edward Witten. A WZW model is associated to a Lie group, and its symmetry algebra is the affine Lie algebra built from the corresponding Lie algebra. By extension, the name WZW model is sometimes used for any conformal field theory whose symmetry algebra is an affine Lie algebra.
In mathematics, the elliptic gamma function is a generalization of the q-gamma function, which is itself the q-analog of the ordinary gamma function. It is closely related to a function studied by Jackson (1905), and can be expressed in terms of the triple gamma function. It is given by
Julius Erich Wess was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted as the co-inventor of the Wess–Zumino model and Wess–Zumino–Witten model in the field of supersymmetry and conformal field theory. He was also a recipient of the Max Planck medal, the Wigner medal, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Heineman Prize, and of several honorary doctorates.
Bruno Zumino was an Italian theoretical physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his DSc degree from the University of Rome in 1945.
Arthur Michael Jaffe is an American mathematical physicist at Harvard University, where in 1985 he succeeded George Mackey as the Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science.
William Allan Bardeen is an American theoretical physicist who worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is renowned for his foundational work on the chiral anomaly, the Yang-Mills and gravitational anomalies, the development of quantum chromodynamics and the scheme frequently used in perturbative analysis of experimentally observable processes such as deep inelastic scattering, high energy collisions and flavor changing processes.
Maurice A. de Gosson, is an Austrian mathematician and mathematical physicist, born in 1948 in Berlin. He is currently a Senior Researcher at the Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group (NuHAG) of the University of Vienna.
Alexander Nikolaevich Varchenko is a Soviet and Russian mathematician working in geometry, topology, combinatorics and mathematical physics.
Antti Kupiainen is a Finnish mathematical physicist.
This is a glossary of properties and concepts in symplectic geometry in mathematics. The terms listed here cover the occurrences of symplectic geometry both in topology as well as in algebraic geometry. The glossary also includes notions from Hamiltonian geometry, Poisson geometry and geometric quantization.
Thomas Hans Willwacher is a German mathematician and mathematical physicist working as a Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, ETH Zurich.
Daya Shankar Kulshreshtha is an Indian theoretical physicist, specializing in formal aspects of quantum field theory, string theory, supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory, Dirac's instant-form and light-front quantization of field theories and D-brane actions. His work on the models of gravity focuses on the studies of charged compact boson stars and boson shells.
Yongbin Ruan is a Chinese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and symplectic geometry with applications to string theory.
Alberto Sergio Cattaneo is an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist, specializing in geometry related to quantum field theory and string theory.
Krzysztof Gawędzki was a Polish mathematical physicist, a graduate of the University of Warsaw and professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. He was primarily known for his research on quantum field theory and statistical physics. In 2022, he shared the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics with Antti Kupiainen.
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