Name Arthur Jaffe | Role Physicist | |
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Education Princeton University (1966) Books Vortices and Monopoles: Structure of Static Gauge Theories Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada Organizations founded Clay Mathematics Institute Similar People James Glimm, Clifford Taubes, Landon T Clay, Raoul Bott, Andrew Wiles | ||
School of Theoretical Physics Statutory Public Lecture “Beauty and Truth in Mathematics and Physics”
Arthur Michael Jaffe (born December 22, 1937) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor at Harvard University.
Contents
- School of Theoretical Physics Statutory Public Lecture Beauty and Truth in Mathematics and Physics
- Professional career
- Contributions
- Awards and honors
- Personal history
- References
Professional career
Jaffe attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics. Currently Jaffe teaches Mathematical Physics and pursues research at Harvard University. His doctoral students include Joel Feldman, Ezra Getzler, and Clifford Taubes.
For several years Jaffe was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, and later of the American Mathematical Society. He chaired the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. He presently serves as Chair of the Board of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Theoretical Physics.
Jaffe conceived the idea of the Clay Mathematics Institute and its programs, including the employment of research fellows and the Millennium Prizes in mathematics. He served as a founding Member, a founding member of the Board, and the founding President of that organization.
Arthur Jaffe began as chief editor of Communications in Mathematical Physics in 1979 and served for 21 years until 2001.
Contributions
With James Glimm, he founded the subject called constructive quantum field theory. Their major achievement was to establish existence theorems for two- and three-dimensional examples of non-linear, relativistic quantum fields.
Awards and honors
Awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1980. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Personal history
Jaffe was married from 1971 to 1992 to Nora F. Crow (aka Nora Crow Jaffe), now a Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and an authority on the 18th-century Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Crow accompanied Jaffe on most of his national and international sojourns, including his stays at the ETH in Zürich and the IHES in Büres-sur-Yvette. She gave birth to their daughter, Margaret Collins Jaffe, on September 10, 1986.
In September 1992, Jaffe married Sarah Warren, who worked in the Mathematics Department at Harvard. The marriage lasted for nine years before ending in divorce.