Richard S. Ward

Richard Samuel Ward ( born 1951 ) is a British mathematical physicist and mathematician.

Ward in 1977 received his doctorate at the University of Oxford with Roger Penrose. and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Durham.

He worked with Penrose on the twistor theory and integrable systems generally exactly in field theory, such as monopolies, instantons, topological solitons and skyrmions. He developed a nonlinear generalization of the Penrose transform in the twistor theory, which he used with Michael Atiyah for the description of instantons with vector bundles over the three dimensional complex projective space.

Ward was in 2005 a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1989 he was awarded the Whitehead Prize.

Writings

• Raymond O. Wells Twistor geometry and field theory, Cambridge University Press 1990
• Nigel Hitchin, Graeme Segal Integrable systems: twistors, loop groups, and Riemann surfaces, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1999