Jacques Distler

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Jacques Distler

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1961|01|01|mf=yes}}

| birth_place = Montreal, Quebec, Canada

| death_date =

| death_place =

| field = physics, string theory

| work_institutions = University of Texas at Austin

| alma_mater = Harvard University and Herzliah High School (Snowdon)

}}

Jacques Distler (born January 1, 1961) is a Canadian-born American physicist working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994.

Early life and education

Distler was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School (Snowdon) along with noted Pediatric Researcher Daniel Wechsler.{{cn|date=May 2022}} He attended Harvard University, also with Dan Wechsler, for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis Compactified String Theories was supervised by Sidney Coleman.{{MathGenealogy|id=93820|title=Jacques Joseph Distler}}

Physics career

Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at Princeton University.

According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on conformal field theory in two dimensions. His earliest paper is Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory, co-authored with André LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B.

He has studied the "landscape" of metastable vacua in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic.[https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507090 Random polynomials and the friendly landscape] July 2005, arXiv.org Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board.[https://arxiv.org/help/physics/#AdvisoryCommittee arXiv advisory board]{{failed verification|date=April 2018}}

He has a blog Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth, one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.{{citation needed|date=July 2018}}

Personal life

Distler maintains a [http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/shoah/ webpage] dedicated to his father, who was born in Poland and escaped the German slave camps of World War II.

Notes

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References

  • A. LeClair and J. Distler, Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory, Nucl. Phys. B273 (1986) 552.
  • J. Distler and H. Kawai, Conformal Field Theory and 2-D Quantum Gravity or Who's Afraid of Joseph Liouville?, Nucl. Phys. B321 (1989) 509.