Arthur Jaffe

Arthur Jaffe ( born December 22, 1937) is an American mathematical physicist who mainly deals with quantum field theory.

Life

Jaffe grew up in Pelham (New York). He studied chemistry at Princeton University (BA 1959, "summa cum laude" ) and then mathematics at Cambridge University (Clare College, BA 1961). In 1961 he went to Princeton, where at Arthur Strong Wightman he received his doctorate in physics in 1966 and made his degrees in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In between, he in 1963 /4 with Wightman at the IHES in Paris, where he met Res Jost and Klaus Hepp. In 1966 he was moved to Stanford University and in 1967 assistant professor at Harvard University, where he was professor of physics in 1970, in 1973 the mathematicians and was from 1987 to 1990 Chairman of the Department of Mathematics. He is currently at Harvard " Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science". He was a visiting professor at the ETH Zurich (1968), the beginning of a collaboration, among other things Robert Schrader, Konrad Osterwalder and Jürg Fröhlich of the ETH Zurich from the early 1970s, and at the Rockefeller University, the University " La Sapienza " in Rome and at Princeton University.

In 1979 he was awarded the prize in mathematical physics of the New York Academy of Sciences, and in 1980 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. He was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics and for 21 years editor of the " Communications in Mathematical Physics ". In 1978 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki ( Introduction to gauge theories ).

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He is a founding member of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which he was president from 1998 to 2001, and (1976), one of the founders of the Summer School of Theoretical Physics in Cargese, Corsica, which he organized from 1976 to 1996. In 1978 he held a Invited Address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki. In 2005, he was the successor of Michael Atiyah as Chairman of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. 1997/8, he was president of the American Mathematical Society, of which he is a Fellow.

Work

1969 to 1972 he put in a series of papers with James Glimm the basis for the " Constructive Quantum Field Theory", presented in her book " Quantum Physics - a functional integral point of view" ( Springer 1981, 1987). They reasoned also perturbation theory - independent use of the renormalization procedure and proved to be a first, the existence of non-trivial relativistic quantum field theories (in 2 and 3 spatial dimensions, the case d = 4 is still open ) and the existence of different phases in quantum field theories. Later he dealt, inter alia, to gauge theory and noncommutative geometry.

His article with Frank Quinn, " Theoretical Mathematics - towards a cultural synthesis of mathematics and theoretical physics" resulted in the Bulletin of the AMS in 1993 to a debate on the role of mathematical rigor in applied mathematics (especially of string theory ).

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