Peter Freund

Peter George Oliver Freund ( born September 7, 1936 in Timişoara, Romania, often as a friend PGO ) is an American theoretical physicist.

Life

Friend studied in his hometown of Timisoara ( Timisoara ), with the diploma in 1958. After he was executed in Romania as a student at demonstrations in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956 by the Securitate secret police almost on the road, he left in 1959 Romania and went to the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1960 with the thesis " on the problem of the structure of elementary particles " with Walter Thirring. After that, he was an assistant of Thirring and then went to the University of Geneva. From 1963 he was at the University of Chicago, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1965 and later was a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute. Today he is a professor emeritus. In 1964 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Friend is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Timişoara. He has also appeared as a writer of short stories, published in his book " West of the West End " (2008) and also in the online literary journal " Exquisite Corpse". With his remaining in Romania friend, the writer Radu Ciobanu, he wrote the book "Dialogue on the Atlantic " published in Romanian in 2006, which reflects their different fates. In "A Passion for Discovery " he gives biographical sketches of physicists and mathematicians.

He is married to a psychiatrist since 1963 and has two daughters. At the instigation of Thirring in 1961 he received the Austrian citizenship, but took after the Waldheim affair the U.S. citizenship.

Work

Friend was one of the pioneers of the dual model, from which the string theory arose. Specifically, he discovered with Haim Harari 1968 an extension of the original dual model corresponding in their subsequent interpretation closed as string theory strings .. From the mid- 1970s he examined Kaluza-Klein theories and Kompaktifizierungsmechanismen for the extra dimensions, some with his student Yong Min Cho, and applied these theories in cosmology. In connection with his student Mark Rubin he found as special solutions of the supergravity elfdimensionalen products from compact Einstein manifolds with anti - de Sitter spaces of negative curvature ( respectively four and siebendimensional ) ..

He also studied number theory string versions, p- adic strings and adelische strings that serve as a model versions to test assumptions about the mathematical structure of string theories.

With the Chicago mathematician Irving Kaplansky he classified simple supersymmetries and found mathematical connections of supersymmetries on spaces of negative curvature ( such as anti- de Sitter spaces ).

In 1985, he discovered a connection between bosonic strings that exist only in 26 dimensions, and superstrings, which exist in 10 dimensions, which was important for the formulation of the heterotic string.

Peter Freund made ​​in the 1960s concrete predictions for the behavior of the cross sections in the scattering processes of hadrons, which are known as friend - relations. With his student Jim Feigenbaum he also examined the scale behavior of stock markets before the stock market crash ..