Richard S. Ward

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Richard Samuel Ward
Born (1951-09-06) 6 September 1951 (age 71) [1]
Education
Known for Penrose–Ward transform
Ward's conjecture
Ward construction [3]
Awards Whitehead Prize (1989)
Fellow of the Royal Society (2005)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions University of Durham
Doctoral advisor Roger Penrose [2]
Doctoral students Paul Sutcliffe
Website www.maths.dur.ac.uk/~dma0rsw/

Richard Samuel Ward FRS (born 6 September 1951) is a British mathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical & Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Durham. [4]

Contents

Work

Ward earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1977, under the supervision of Roger Penrose. He is most famous for his extension of Penrose's twistor theory to nonlinear cases, which he with Michael Atiyah used to describe instantons by vector bundles on the three-dimensional complex projective space. He has related interests in the theory of monopoles, topological solitons and skyrmions.

Honors and awards

Ward was awarded the Whitehead Prize in 1989 for his work in mathematical physics. [5] He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2005. [6] His certificate of election reads:

Richard Ward is distinguished for pioneering and elegant research in mathematical physics. He adapted the twistor transform to the self-dual Yang-Mills (SDYM) equation, and with Atiyah constructed general multi-instanton solutions. His discovery of the toroidal BPS two-monopole was a breakthrough in soliton theory. He showed that virtually all known integrable equations arise from SDYM by dimensional and algebraic reductions, allowing a unified solution method. Ward's twistor transform of SDYM, applied to string theory, is leading to striking progress in quantum Yang-Mills theory. [7]

Bibliography

Books

Selected academic works

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. 1 2 "WARD, Prof. Richard Samuel" . Who's Who . Vol. 2016 (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. 1 2 Richard S. Ward at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Ward, R. S. (1977). "On self-dual gauge fields". Physics Letters A. 61 (2): 81–82. Bibcode:1977PhLA...61...81W. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(77)90842-8.
  4. Staff profile, University of Durham, retrieved May 14, 2022.
  5. Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, retrieved 2016-02-27.
  6. Notices of the AMS - Sept 2005 American Mathematical Society
  7. "EC/2005/41: Ward, Richard Samuel". The Royal Society . Retrieved 19 March 2016.