Peter Goddard (physicist)

Peter Goddard ( born September 3, 1945 in England ) is a British theoretical physicist who deals with elementary particle physics.

Goddard studied at Cambridge University mathematics and theoretical physics, where he made his bachelor's degree in 1966 and 1967, his master's degree under John Polkinghorne. After that, he was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, interrupted by a stay from 1970 to 1972 at CERN. In 1971 he received his doctorate in Cambridge ( and 1996 he also received a D.Sc. from the University of Cambridge ). From 1972 he was a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Durham and in 1975 in Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of St. John 's College. From 1980 he was a tutor from 1983 Senior Tutor at St John 's College. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1989 and was Reader in mathematical physics at Cambridge. In 1992 he became a professor at Cambridge in 1994 and Master of St. John 's College. Since 1994 he is a Senior Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, at its inception in 1992, he was much more involved and its first Executive Director ( Deputy Director ), he was from 1991 to 1994. He was a visiting professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Imperial College London and at the IHES. 1974 and 1988 he was at Princeton, whose director he was in 2004 at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Goddard engaged in since the early 1970s with string theory. From 1976, he worked with David Olive and C. Montonen on the theory of magnetic monopoles and their (electro - magnetic ) duality. This duality concept was later important in the "second superstring revolution" in the 1990s. With Olive, he also studied in the 1980s representations of high dimensional ( Kac -Moody and Virasoro ) algebras in the framework of string theory. He has worked with, among others Louise Dolan.

Goddard is a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. In 1997 he received the David Olive Dirac Medal ( ICTP ). In 2008, he was President of the London Mathematical Society. He was Commander of the British Empire in 2002.

Writings

• With Olive (Editor): Kac - Moody and Virasoro algebras. A reprint volume for physicists. World Scientific 1988