Philippe Di Francesco

Last updated

Philippe Di Francesco is a French-American mathematician, focusing in mathematical physics, physical combinatorics and integrable systems. He is senior researcher (Directeur de Recherche) at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Saclay in France, and is currently the Morris and Gertrude Fine Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois. [1] [2] He is also author of the book 'Conformal Field Theory'. [3] He received his PhD in 1989, under Jean-Claude Le Guillou and Jean-Bernard Zuber, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Witten</span> American theoretical physicist

Edward Witten is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical physics</span> Application of mathematical methods to problems in physics

Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories". An alternative definition would also include those mathematics that are inspired by physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Pierre Serre</span> French mathematician

Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Bateman</span> British-American mathematician

Harry Bateman FRS was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in his Gibbs Lecture in 1943 titled, "The control of an elastic fluid".

In mathematical physics, the conformal symmetry of spacetime is expressed by an extension of the Poincaré group, known as the conformal group. The extension includes special conformal transformations and dilations. In three spatial plus one time dimensions, conformal symmetry has 15 degrees of freedom: ten for the Poincaré group, four for special conformal transformations, and one for a dilation.

In string theory, a worldsheet is a two-dimensional manifold which describes the embedding of a string in spacetime. The term was coined by Leonard Susskind as a direct generalization of the world line concept for a point particle in special and general relativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Bourgain</span> Belgian mathematician

Jean Louis, baron Bourgain was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antoine Augustin Cournot</span> French economist and mathematician

Antoine Augustin Cournot was a French philosopher and mathematician who also contributed to the development of economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Cartier (mathematician)</span> French mathematician

Pierre Émile Cartier is a French mathematician. An associate of the Bourbaki group and at one time a colleague of Alexander Grothendieck, his interests have ranged over algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and category theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leo Kadanoff</span> American physicist

Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society (APS). He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.

Miguel Ángel Virasoro was an Argentine 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Zamolodchikov</span> Russian physicist

Alexander Borisovich Zamolodchikov is a Russian physicist, known for his contributions to condensed matter physics, two-dimensional conformal field theory, and statistical mechanics, and is currently the C.N. Yang – Wei Deng Endowed Chair of Physics at Stony Brook University.

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud is a French physicist. He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management (CFM), adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance at Imperial College London. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and held the Bettencourt Innovation Chair at Collège de France in 2020.

Jean Zinn-Justin is a French theoretical physicist.

Nikolai Georgievich Makarov is a Russian mathematician. He is known for his work in complex analysis and its applications to dynamical systems, probability theory and mathematical physics. He is currently the Richard Merkin Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, where he has been teaching since 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claude Itzykson</span> French theoretical physicist (1938–1995)

Claude Georges Itzykson, was a French theoretical physicist who worked in quantum field theory and statistical mechanics.

Vyacheslav Rychkov is a Russian-Italian-French theoretical physicist and mathematician.

Rinat Kedem is an American mathematician and mathematical physicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Krzysztof Gawedzki</span> Polish mathematical physicist (1947–2022)

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.

The Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) is a research institute of the Direction of Fundamental Research (DRF) of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The Institute is also a joint research unit of the Institute of Physics (INP), a subsidiary of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). It is associated to the Paris-Saclay University. IPhT is situated on the Saclay Plateau South of Paris.

References

  1. "Philippe Di Francesco". illinois.edu. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  2. "Philippe Di Francesco". illinois.edu. Retrieved May 13, 2017.
  3. Conformal Field Theory. Graduate Texts in Contemporary Physics. Springer. 1997. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-2256-9. ISBN   978-1-4612-7475-9.
  4. "Philippe Di Francesco". The Mathematics Genealogy Project.