Gates, the oldest of four siblings, was born in Tampa, Florida, the son of Sylvester James Gates Sr. a career U.S. Army man, and Charlie Engels Gates. His mother died at age 42 of breast cancer when he was 11. Gates, Sr. raised his children while serving full time in the U.S. Army and retired as a sergeant major after 27 years of service — one of the first African Americans to earn this position. Gates, Sr., later worked in public education and as a union organizer.[3]
Education
When his father remarried, his stepmother, a teacher, brought books into the home and emphasized the importance of education.[4] The family moved many times while Gates was growing up, but, as he was entering 11th grade, settled in Orlando, Florida, where James attended Jones High School—his first experience in a segregated African-American school. Comparing his own school's quality to neighboring white schools, "I understood pretty quickly that the cards were really stacked against us."[5] Nevertheless, an 11th grade course in physics established Gates' career interest in physics, especially its mathematical side. At his father's urging, he applied for admission to MIT.
S. James Gates lectures from a chalkboard.
Gates received two BS degrees from MIT in mathematics and physics (1973) as well as his PhD (1977). His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M. T. Grisaru, M. Rocek and W. Siegel, Gates coauthored Superspace, or One thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry.[6]
Career
In 1984 he gained an associate professor position at the University of Maryland (UMD) physics department. In 1988, he became the professor of physics at UMD, a position he held until 2017, becoming the first African American to have an endowed position at a major American research university.[7] In 2022 Gates rejoined the University of Maryland as the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, Clark Leadership Chair in Science in the department of physics and the school of public policy at the University of Maryland.[8]
Gates was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010–11) and was a residential scholar at MIT's Simmons Hall. He is pursuing ongoing research into string theory, supersymmetry, and supergravity. His current research focus is on Adinkra symbols, a graph-theoretic technique for studying supersymmetric representation theories.
In 2018, Gates was elected to the presidential line of the American Physical Society: he began serving as its vice president in 2019, served as president in 2021, and past president in 2022.[9]
Gates has been featured in TurboTax and Verizon commercials and has been featured extensively on NOVA PBS programs on physics, notably The Elegant Universe (2003). He completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality (2006) for The Teaching Company consisting of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople.[17]
During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated a ballet "The Elegant Universe", where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms connected to his scientific research.[18] Gates Appeared on the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.[19] Gates also appeared in the BBC Horizon documentary The Hunt for Higgs in 2012, and the NOVA documentary Big Bang Machine in 2015.
Publications
Superspace or 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry, (with M. T. Grisaru, M. Roček, and W. Siegel), Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company (1983), Reading, MA (On-line; http://aps.arXiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0108200).
L'arte della fisica superspace, Stringhe, superstringhe, teoria unificata dei campi, 2006, Di Renzo Editore, ISBN88-8323-155-4.
Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck's the Higgs?, (with Steven Jacob Sekula and Frank Blitzer), YBK Publishers, Inc. (2018), New York, New York, ( ISBN978-1-936411-39-9).
Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe, (with Cathie Pelletier), Publisher: PublicAffairs (September 24, 2019) ISBN978-1541762251.
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.
Michael James Duff FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and pioneering theorist of supergravity who is the Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.
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.
In theoretical physics, extended supersymmetry is supersymmetry whose infinitesimal generators carry not only a spinor index , but also an additional index where is integer.
Martin Roček is a professor of theoretical physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a member of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1975 and 1979. He did post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and Caltech before becoming a professor at Stony Brook University.
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.
Ulf Lindström is a Swedish theoretical physicist working in the fields of string theory, supersymmetry, and general relativity.
In theoretical physics a nonrenormalization theorem is a limitation on how a certain quantity in the classical description of a quantum field theory may be modified by renormalization in the full quantum theory. Renormalization theorems are common in theories with a sufficient amount of supersymmetry, usually at least 4 supercharges.
Paul Kingsley Townsend FRS is a British physicist, currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his work on string theory.
Christopher Michael Hull is a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Hull is known for his work on string theory, M-theory, and generalized complex structures. Edward Witten drew partially from Hull's work for his development of M-theory.
Warren Siegel is a theoretical physicist specializing in supersymmetric quantum field theory and string theory. He was a professor at the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. He retired in Fall of 2022.
In supergravity and supersymmetric representation theory, Adinkra symbols are a graphical representation of supersymmetric algebras. Mathematically they can be described as colored finite connected simple graphs, that are bipartite and n-regular. Their name is derived from Adinkra symbols of the same name, and they were introduced by Michael Faux and Sylvester James Gates in 2004.
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Lars Elof Gustaf Brink was a Swedish theoretical physicist.
Jonathan Anders Bagger is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy physics and string theory. He is known for the Bagger–Lambert–Gustavsson action.
The Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics (MCFP) is a research institute at the University of Maryland, College Park focused on theoretical physics.
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