Peter Goddard (physicist)

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

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

Goddard dealt with string theory as early as the early 1970s . From 1976 he worked with David Olive and C. Montonen on the theory of magnetic monopoles and their (electro-magnetic) dualities . This duality concept later became important in the "second superstring revolution" in the 1990s. With Olive he also investigated representations of infinitely dimensional ( Kac-Moody - and Virasoro -) algebras in the context of string theory in the 1980s . He worked with Louise Dolan , among others .

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

Fonts

• with Olive (editor): Kac-Moody and Virasoro Algebras. A reprint volume for physicists . World Scientific 1988

Web links

• Biography at the IAS
• Appreciation for the award of the Dirac medal