Philip Candelas

Philip Candelas ( born October 24, 1951 in London ) is a British physicist who deals with string theory.

Candelas studied from 1970 at the University of Cambridge ( Christ's College ) with a bachelor 's degree in 1973, and from 1972 at the University of Oxford in Wadham College, where he was a student of Dennis Sciama. From 1975 he was a Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, 1976/77 he was at the University of Texas at Austin with John Archibald Wheeler. In 1977 he received his doctorate in Oxford with a thesis on Quantum Gravity. Then he went back to the University of Texas, where he was an assistant professor in 1977, associate professor in 1983 and professor in 1989. Since 1999 he is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford.

He was in 1993/94 at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1991 to 1993 visiting scientist at CERN and 1995 Visiting Professor at Princeton University.

Candelas is mainly known for work with Edward Witten, Andrew Strominger and Gary Horowitz of 1985, in which they introduced the compactification of superstring theories with Calabi -Yau spaces. It shall also continue with the geometry of Calabi -Yau spaces and relations to number theory and made fundamental contributions to the mirror symmetry ( mirror symmetry ).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He has besides the UK, the U.S. citizenship. He is married to a professor of mathematics Xenia de la Ossa and has two daughters.