Gabriele Veneziano

Gabriele Veneziano ( born September 7, 1942 in Florence ) is an Italian physicist who is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.

Life and work

Until 1965, Veneziano studied physics in Florence. He was then a PhD for further studies from 1966 to 1968 at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel in 1967. From 1968 to 1972 he was a post-doc and "visiting associate professor" at MIT and then back to the Weizmann Institute. He was from 1975 to 1977 full professor. Since 1976 he conducts research at CERN since 1977 as " senior staff member" and was between 1994 and 1996 director of the theoretical division. He also took 2004 an offer of a professorship at the Collège de France.

At CERN, he also led in 1968 his most famous work, which made ​​him the "father" of string theory. He found a formula for scattering amplitudes of resonances of the strong interaction, which used the classical Euler beta function and a duality expressed ( Veneziano amplitude ). After the mid-1970s turned out that the quantum theory of strings only exists in higher dimensions and not, as originally hoped as a theory of the strong interaction was concerned, to Veneziano's interest shifted to the quantum chromodynamics. From the 1990s he worked for example with string theory quantum cosmology, in which he examined the problem of singularities of black holes and the cosmological Big Bang.

Veneziano 's 2002 Member of the French Academy of Sciences and, since 1996, the Accademia dei Lincei. He received the Russian Pomeranchuk Prize ( 1999), the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics ( 2004), the Albert Einstein Medal (2006), the Oskar Klein Medal ( 2007) and the Premio Enrico Fermi (2005 ). In 2000 he received the Gold Medal of the Italian Republic and was founded in 2007 Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

He is married to the Parisian professor of psycholinguistics Edy Pacifici since 1966 and the couple have two daughters.