Erik Verlinde

Erik Peter Verlinde ( born January 21, 1962 in Woudenberg ) is a Dutch physicist who deals with string theory.

Verlinde attended high school in Utrecht and then studied from 1980 at the University of Utrecht, where he studied with Gerardus ' t Hooft and Bernard de Wit and received his doctorate in 1988 ( " Conformal field theory and its application to strings" ). He was then to 1993 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Edward Witten, where he worked on quantum gravity and string theory. Then he was at the theory department of CERN and also taught at the University of Utrecht. He became a professor at Princeton University in 1999. He is at the University of Amsterdam, where he since 2003 leads a string theory group with Jan de Boer and Robbert Dijkgraaf since 2002 professor.

From him comes the Verlindeformel in conformal field theory, which he developed in his dissertation, and the Verlindealgebra.

In 2009 he developed the concept of gravity as entropy force, which is based on a thermodynamic interpretation of gravity by Ted Jacobson (1995).

He is the twin brother of the string theorist Herman Verlinde, with whom he also worked.