Luis Fernando Alday FRS is presently Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Mathematical Physics Group.
His research interests are bootstrap approach to conformal field theories and string theory, several aspects of the AdS/CFT duality, four-dimensional N=2 super-symmetric theories and their relation to conformal field theories and exact computation of observables in super-symmetric gauge theories.
Alday was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2022. [1]
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
Robertus Henricus "Robbert" Dijkgraaf is a Dutch theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist, and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands from 2022 until 2024. From July 2012 until his inauguration as a minister, he had been the director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and a tenured professor at the University of Amsterdam.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian and American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.
Mathai Varghese is a mathematician at the University of Adelaide. His first most influential contribution is the Mathai–Quillen formalism, which he formulated together with Daniel Quillen, and which has since found applications in index theory and topological quantum field theory. He was appointed a full professor in 2006. He was appointed Director of the Institute for Geometry and its Applications in 2009. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2013, he was appointed the Elder Professor of Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. In 2017, he was awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Hannan Medal and Lecture from the Australian Academy of Science, recognizing an outstanding career in Mathematics. In 2021, he was also awarded the prestigious George Szekeres Medal which is the Australian Mathematical Society’s most prestigious medal, recognising research achievement and an outstanding record of promoting and supporting the discipline.
Ian Grant Macdonald was a British mathematician known for his contributions to symmetric functions, special functions, Lie algebra theory and other aspects of algebra, algebraic combinatorics, and combinatorics.
Miguel Ángel Virasoro was an Argentine mathematician and theoretical physicist. Virasoro worked in Argentina, Israel, the United States, and France, but he spent most of his professional career in Italy at La Sapienza University of Rome. He shared a name with his father, the philosopher Miguel Ángel Virasoro. He was known for his foundational work in string theory, the study of spin glasses, and his research in other areas of mathematical and statistical physics. The Virasoro–Shapiro amplitude, the Virasoro algebra, the super Virasoro algebra, the Virasoro vertex operator algebra, the Virasoro group, the Virasoro conjecture, the Virasoro conformal block, and the Virasoro minimal model are all named after him.
Michael James David Powell was a British mathematician, who worked in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge.
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.
John Lawrence CardyFRS is a British–American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in theoretical condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics, and in particular for research on critical phenomena and two-dimensional conformal field theory.
Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian-British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at EPFL and at Imperial College London. He previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours a mathematician can achieve. In 2020 he won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Ian Keith Affleck is a Canadian physicist specializing in condensed matter physics. He is Killam University Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia.
Kevin Joseph Costello FRS is an Irish mathematician, since 2014 the Krembil Foundation's William Rowan Hamilton chair of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
In theoretical physics, the AGT correspondence is a relationship between Liouville field theory on a punctured Riemann surface and a certain four-dimensional SU(2) gauge theory obtained by compactifying the 6D (2,0) superconformal field theory on the surface. The relationship was discovered by Luis Alday, Davide Gaiotto, and Yuji Tachikawa in 2009. It was soon extended to a more general relationship between AN-1 Toda field theory and SU(N) gauge theories. The idea of the AGT correspondence has also been extended to describe relationships between three-dimensional theories.
In theoretical physics, the six-dimensional (2,0)-superconformal field theory is a quantum field theory whose existence is predicted by arguments in string theory. It is still poorly understood because there is no known description of the theory in terms of an action functional. Despite the inherent difficulty in studying this theory, it is considered to be an interesting object for a variety of reasons, both physical and mathematical.
Davide Silvano Achille Gaiotto is an Italian mathematical physicist who deals with quantum field theories and string theory. He received the Gribov Medal in 2011 and the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2013.
Hugh Osborn is a British theoretical high-energy physicist and a professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is known for his work on Conformal Field Theory and Quantum Field Theory.
Geordie Williamson is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36.
Jack A. Thorne is a British mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the Langlands Program. He specialises in algebraic number theory.
Stephen Albert Fulling is an American mathematician and mathematical physicist, specializing in the mathematics of quantum theory, general relativity, and the spectral and asymptotic theory of differential operators. He is known for preliminary work that led to the discovery of the hypothetical Unruh effect.
Niklas Beisert is a German theoretical physicist, known for his research on quantum field theory and string theory.