Edward Witten
fl. 1951, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
American theoretical physicist whose quantum-field-theory methods transformed topology and geometry; the only physicist to win the Fields Medal (1990).
Edward Witten was born in Baltimore in 1951, the son of theoretical physicist Louis Witten. He studied history at Brandeis University before switching to physics, taking his PhD at Princeton in 1976 under David Gross. After holding a professorship at Princeton he moved in 1987 to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has spent his career.
Witten is the central figure in the dialogue between quantum field theory, string theory and pure mathematics. Among the works cited by his 1990 Fields Medal are the supersymmetric reformulation of Morse theory, a path-integral derivation of the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, the interpretation of Donaldson invariants via topological gauge theory, and the discovery that Chern–Simons theory yields knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. Later he introduced with Nathan Seiberg the Seiberg–Witten invariants (1994), which simplified four-manifold theory and led to a simple proof of the Thom conjecture; he also gave a supersymmetric proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity and proposed M-theory (1995) unifying the five superstring theories.
His honors include the MacArthur Fellowship (1982), the Fields Medal (1990), the inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize (2012), and the Kyoto Prize (2014). He remains the most influential figure at the interface of mathematics and physics.
Workplaces: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
United States