Miguel Virasoro

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Miguel Ángel Virasoro (born May 9, 1940 in Buenos Aires ; † July 23, 2021 there ) was an Argentine theoretical physicist who was one of the pioneers of string theory .

Career

Virasoro studied from 1958 at the University of Buenos Aires . In 1962 he obtained his licentiate and in 1967 he did his doctorate there. The year before, the university was shaken by the violent action of the Argentine police ( Night of the Long Sticks, La Noche de los Bastones Largos) on July 29, 1966 after the military coup by General Ongania , in which many well-known professors (including those from the natural sciences) lost their office. As a post-doctoral student , he went to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in Israel in 1967/68 , where he and Gabriele Veneziano , who shortly afterwards found the first clues about string theory, discussed the then current Boostrap theory of the S matrixworked, and from 1968 to 1970 at the University of Wisconsin , where the early string theorists Bunji Sakita and Keiji Kikkawa were at that time . In 1970/71 he was at the University of California, Berkeley . From 1971 to 1974 he was an assistant professor at the University of Buenos Aires . In 1975/76 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He also returned briefly to Argentina, but after the military coup in 1976 he stayed abroad, at the École normal supérieure and in Italy, where he became professor in Lecce in 1981 and in Rome in 1982. From 1995 to 2002 he was director of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste , which awarded him his Dirac medal in 2020 . He later taught at La Sapienza University in Rome .

He was visiting scholar at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, at the Pontifical University in Rio de Janeiro, at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto and at the Hebrew University .

Virasoro is known for the Virasoro algebras in string theory . With Giorgio Parisi and Marc Mézard he worked on spin glasses and discovered with them the ultrametric hierarchical organization of the states of spin glasses at low temperatures.

In the 2000s he occupied himself with, among other things. with models of the brain and economic models.

He was a member of the Third World Academy of Sciences and, from 1998, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He was married to Sylvia Strusberg and had a son. Virasoro died in Buenos Aires in July 2021 at the age of 81.

Fonts

  • 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, Mezard: Spin-Glass Theory and Beyond. World Scientific 1998
  • Toulouse, Rammal, Virasoro: Ultrametricity for physicists. Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 58, 1986, p. 765
  • Virasoro: The little story of an algebra. In: Gasperini, Maharana, Veneziano (editor): String theory and fundamental interactions. Springer 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fallció el físico Miguel Ángel Virasoro , exactas.uba.ar, July 23, 2021, accessed on July 26, 2021.
  2. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  3. ↑ admin: Physics: Virasoro died, studied string theory. Retrieved July 24, 2021 (American English).
personal data
SURNAME Virasoro, Miguel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Virasoro, Miguel Ángel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine physicist
BIRTH DATE May 9, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Buenos Aires