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Edward Witten Receives Nemmers Prize comm-nemmers.qxp 5/10/00 1:49 PM Page 666 Edward Witten Receives Nemmers Prize EDWARD WITTEN, professor of California Institute of Technology. In connection physics at the Institute for with the receipt of the prize, Witten will spend a Advanced Study in Princeton, period of residence at Northwestern, during which has been awarded the he will present a public lecture and interact with Frederic Esser Nemmers students and members of the faculty. Prize in Mathematics. The Witten received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. prize, awarded by North- In 1985 he received the Einstein Medal from the western University, carries a Einstein Society and the Physical and Mathemat- $100,000 stipend. ics Science Award from the New York Academy of Witten is regarded as the Sciences. In 1996 Time magazine profiled him as world’s premier theoretical one of the twenty-five most influential people in physicist. Known for his America. many contributions to par- Northwestern University also awarded the Erwin Photograph courtesy of C. J. Mozzochi. Edward Witten ticle physics and string the- Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics to Daniel L. ory, he has almost single- McFadden, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics handedly constructed a new branch of mathe- at the University of California, Berkeley. matical physics. The Nemmers Prizes are awarded every other He is a leading scholar in the field of super- year to scholars who display work of lasting signif- string theory, which seeks to describe all the icance in the fields of mathematics and economics. fundamental forces of nature in one conceptual Initiated in 1994, the prizes are made possible framework. He has proposed an extension of string through bequests from the late Erwin P. Nemmers, physics called “M-Theory” to unify the five sepa- a former member of the Northwestern University rate string theories into one “master” theory (see faculty, and his brother, the late Frederic E. “Magic, Mystery, and Matrix”, by Edward Witten, Nemmers, both of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Consis- Notices, October 1998, pages 1124–1129). tent with the terms of the Nemmers’ bequests, past recipients of the Nobel Prize and current or former Witten’s work on topological quantum field full-time members of the Northwestern faculty are theory, together with many achievements in math- ineligible for a Nemmers Prize. ematics inspired by insights from physics, earned The recipients of the awards are determined him a Fields Medal in 1990. His ideas have inspired by separate selection committees. The year 2000 major mathematical developments, including the selection committees were composed of faculty Jones-Witten theory of three-manifold invariants members from the Massachusetts Institute of and the Seiberg-Witten gauge theory on three- Technology, Stanford University, University of and four-manifolds. He has also provided new Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and perspectives, motivated by insights from physics, Northwestern University. Previous recipients of on some celebrated classical results in mathemat- the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics are Yuri I. ics, such as the Atiyah-Singer index theorem and Manin (1994), Joseph B. Keller (1996), and John H. the Morse inequalities. Conway (1998). Witten was a professor of physics at Princeton —Allyn Jackson from 1980 to 1987, when he joined the Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently on leave at the 666 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 47, NUMBER 6.
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