Miguel Ãngel Virasoro (physicist)
Miguel Angel Virasoro ( born May 9, 1940 in Buenos Aires ) is an Argentine theoretical physicist who is one of the pioneers of string theory.
Virasoro studied from 1958 at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1962, he earned a licentiate and in 1967 he received his doctorate there in the year after the shock of the university by the violence of the Argentine police ( night of the long stick, La Noche de la Bastones Largo ) on July 29, 1966 after the military coup led by General Ongania, in which many well-known professors (also from the natural sciences ) lost their office. As a post - graduate student, he went 1967/68 to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he met with Gabriele Veneziano, who shortly after the first clues found on string theory, worked on the then current bootstrap theory of S- matrix, and 1968-1970 at the University of Wisconsin, where at that time the early string theorist Bunji Sakita and Keiji Kikkawa were. 1970/71 he was he was at the University of California, Berkeley. 1971 to 1974 he was assistant professor at the University of Buenos Aires. 1975/76 he was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. He also returned briefly to Argentina, but after the military coup in 1976, he remained abroad at the École normale supérieure and in Italy, where he became professor in Lecce in 1981 and 1982 in Rome. 1995 to 2002 he was director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics ( ICTP ) in Trieste. He currently teaches at the University La Sapienza in Rome.
He was a visiting scientist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, at the Pontifical University in Rio de Janeiro, at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto and the Hebrew University.
Virasoro is known for the Virasoro algebras in string theory. With Giorgio Parisi and Marc Mézard, he dealt with spin- glasses and discovered with these the ultrametric hierarchical organization of states of spin glasses at low temperatures.
In the 2000s he worked, inter alia, to with models of the brain and economic models.
He is a member of the Third World Academy of Sciences.
He is married to Sylvia Strusberg and has a son.
Writings
- Virasoro, " Subsidiary conditions and ghosts in dual -resonance models", Physical Review D, vol 1, 1970, pp. 2933-2936 (introduction of the Virasoro algebras )
- With Parisi, Mézard: "Spin -Glass Theory and Beyond", World Scientific 1998
- Toulouse, Rammal, Virasoro " Ultrametricity for physicists ," Reviews of Modern Physics, Bd.58, 1986, S.765
- Virasoro: "The little story of an algebra ", in Gasperini, Maharana, Veneziano (Editor) "String theory and fundamental interactions", Springer 2008