Jonathan Mboyo Esole | |
|---|---|
 Esole in 2018 | |
| Born | 24 February 1977 (age 47) |
| Alma mater | Free University of Brussels University of Cambridge Leiden University |
| Children | 2 |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Northeastern University Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Ana Achúcarro |
| Website | northeastern |
Jonathan Mboyo Esole (born February 24, 1977) is an associate professor of mathematics at Northeastern University. He works on the geometry of string theory.
Esole was born in Kinshasa and attended Collège Boboto. He moved to Belgium at the age of three and did not return to the Congo for six years. [1] He studied at the Free University of Brussels, the same university his father had attended. [1] In his thesis, Unicité de la supergravité D=4 N=1 par les méthodes BRST,[ citation needed ] he demonstrated the uniqueness of N=1 supergravity in four spacetime dimensions with minimal assumptions using homological methods. This was a major result in the field as it showed that under mild assumptions that if a free graviton is coupled to a particle of spin 3/2, the only consistent theory will have supersymmetry.[ citation needed ].
He graduated Summa cum laude in 2001, and won the prize for the best thesis. [2] He joined the University of Cambridge for his doctoral studies to study Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, working under director of studies Fernando Quevedo. He moved to Leiden University for his PhD, working with Ana Achúcarro on cosmic strings. [3] His thesis considered Fayet-Iliopoulos terms and BPS cosmic strings in N = 2 supergravity. [4] He served as a visiting fellow at Stanford University, working with Renata Kallosh. He joined KU Leuven as a Marie Curie Fellow, working with Antoine Van Proeyen and Frederic Denef on string theory and supergravity. [5] He spoke at the Marie Curie Fellow Training Workshop. [6]
Esole works on F-theory, a branch of string theory at the interface with mathematics. [7] He joined the Department of Physics at Harvard University as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2008. He moved to the Department of Mathematics in 2013, and was appointed Benjamin Peirce Fellow working with the Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau. [8] He worked on SU(5) models and opened the door to the systematic use of crepant resolutions of singularities in F-theory. [9] He also studied D-brane deconstructions in IIB Orientifolds. [10] He delivered a keynote at the Conference for African American Research in Mathematical Sciences. [11] He was a member of the Center for the Fundamental Law of Nature. Esole was appointed as an assistant professor at Northeastern University in 2016. [12] He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to work on Elliptic Fibrations and String Theory in 2014. This allowed him to investigate F-theory and elliptic fibrations. [13]
In 2017 Esole was named a NextEinstein Forum Fellow. [14] This award celebrates the best young African scientists. [8] He is interested in African education and supports the Lumumba Lab. [15] He is part of the Malaika school, an initiative to teach girls in Kalebuka. [8]
In 2022, Esole was listed as one of the ten members of the newly created African Advisory Board of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Antoine Petit, the General Director of CNRS described the need for this new advisory board as follows: "Scientific cooperation between Africa and Europe is a priority for the CNRS: we want to set up lasting partnerships of excellence to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. To achieve this, we have surrounded ourselves with personalities with whom we can take the right measure of the field, who will help us question our practices and usefully mobilize our forces". [16]
In July 2022, Esole became a nonresident senior fellow of Atlantic Council's Africa Center, directed by Ambassador Rama Yade. [17] The Africa Center was established in September 2009 to help transform U.S. and European policy approaches to Africa by emphasizing the building of strong geopolitical partnerships with African states and strengthening economic growth and prosperity on the continent. [18]
After the 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano near the city of Goma, he created the Linda Project, a platform for African scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs that provides training and equipment and advocates for open-science research and for African countries to own and control their data and scientific equipment. In May 2022, the Linda Project helped establish the first Congolese-owned seismic network monitoring the volcanos of Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyamulagira. Esole personally designed the telemetry of the network. [17]
M-theory is a theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory. Edward Witten first conjectured the existence of such a theory at a string theory conference at the University of Southern California in 1995. Witten's announcement initiated a flurry of research activity known as the second superstring revolution. Prior to Witten's announcement, string theorists had identified five versions of superstring theory. Although these theories initially appeared to be very different, work by many physicists showed that the theories were related in intricate and nontrivial ways. Physicists found that apparently distinct theories could be unified by mathematical transformations called S-duality and T-duality. Witten's conjecture was based in part on the existence of these dualities and in part on the relationship of the string theories to a field theory called eleven-dimensional supergravity.
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.
Edward Witten 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 natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, 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 Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.
In theoretical physics, twistor theory was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1967 as a possible path to quantum gravity and has evolved into a widely studied branch of theoretical and mathematical physics. Penrose's idea was that twistor space should be the basic arena for physics from which space-time itself should emerge. It has led to powerful mathematical tools that have applications to differential and integral geometry, nonlinear differential equations and representation theory, and in physics to general relativity, quantum field theory, and the theory of scattering amplitudes.
In theoretical physics, supergravity is a modern field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity; this is in contrast to non-gravitational supersymmetric theories such as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Supergravity is the gauge theory of local supersymmetry. Since the supersymmetry (SUSY) generators form together with the Poincaré algebra a superalgebra, called the super-Poincaré algebra, supersymmetry as a gauge theory makes gravity arise in a natural way.
Juan Martín Maldacena is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.
In theoretical physics, type II string theory is a unified term that includes both type IIA strings and type IIB strings theories. Type II string theory accounts for two of the five consistent superstring theories in ten dimensions. Both theories have extended supersymmetry which is maximal amount of supersymmetry — namely 32 supercharges — in ten dimensions. Both theories are based on oriented closed strings. On the worldsheet, they differ only in the choice of GSO projection. They were first discovered by Michael Green and John Henry Schwarz in 1982, with the terminology of type I and type II coined to classify the three string theories known at the time.
Sylvester James Gates Jr., known as S. James Gates Jr. or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the Brown University Theoretical Physics Center Director and the Ford Foundation Professor of Physics. He also holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science with the physics department at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also affiliated with the University Maryland's School of Public Policy. He served on former president Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In string theory, K-theory classification refers to a conjectured application of K-theory to superstrings, to classify the allowed Ramond–Ramond field strengths as well as the charges of stable D-branes.
François Loeser is a French mathematician. He is Professor of Mathematics at the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University in Paris. From 2000 to 2010 he was Professor at École Normale Supérieure. Since 2015, he is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University in the United States. Widely known for his contributions to String theory, Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Field theory.
Daniel Zissel Freedman is an American theoretical physicist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. He is mainly known for his work in supergravity. He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Sergio Ferrara is an Italian physicist working on theoretical physics of elementary particles and mathematical physics. He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry". He is an emeritus staff member at CERN and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Gregory W. Moore is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in mathematical physics and string theory. Moore is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Rutgers University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory group.
Boboto College is a private Catholic school run by the Society of Jesus in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was founded by the Belgian Jesuits in 1937.
A. W. Peet is a professor of physics at the University of Toronto. Peet's research interests include string theory as a quantum theory of gravity, quantum field theory and applications of string theory to black holes, gauge theories, cosmology, and the correspondence between anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories.
Anna Ceresole is an Italian high energy physicist and Director of Research in Theoretical Physics at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). She is interested in quantum field theory, supergravity and string theory.
Jonathan Anders Bagger is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy physics and string theory and known for the Bagger–Lambert–Gustavsson action.
Costas Christou Kounnas was a Cypriot theoretical physicist, known for his research on string theory, supersymmetry, supergravity, GUTs, and quantum chromodynamics.
Daniel Louis Jafferis is an American theoretical physicist, known for his research on quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theory, and string theory.
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