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2014 Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics 2014 Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics Gregory W. Moore was awarded Biographical Sketch the 2014 Leonard Eisenbud Prize Gregory W. Moore received his A.B. in physics from for Mathematics and Physics at the Princeton University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in phys- 120th Annual Meeting of the AMS in ics from Harvard University in 1985. He then joined Baltimore, Maryland, in January 2014. the Harvard Society of Fellows and in 1987 became a five-year member at the Institute for Advanced Citation Study (IAS) in Princeton. In 1989 he joined the The 2014 Leonard Eisenbud Prize for faculty at Yale University. He moved to the Depart- Mathematics and Physics is awarded ment of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers Univer- to Gregory W. Moore for his group sity in 2000. He has held visiting professorships of works on the structure of four- at the Kalvi Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) Gregory W. Moore dimensional supersymmetric theories in Santa Barbara, California, and at the IAS. The with extended supersymmetry. His Inspire HEP database lists 170 papers coauthored works on supersymmetric solitons in a variety by Professor Moore on physical mathematics, with of contexts—including black holes in supergrav- an emphasis on geometrical structures in physics. ity, branes in string theory, and monopoles in Most notably he has worked on rational conformal gauge theory—have led to an explanation of the field theories (with applications to condensed mat- wall-crossing phenomena in the BPS spectrum. ter physics), two-dimensional quantum gravity and Moore’s research has injected new physical ideas matrix models, topological field theories, string and created new constructions in the mathematical dualities and D-branes, applications of K-theory to fields of cluster algebras, integrable systems, and string theory, connections between number theory hyperkähler geometry. and supersymmetric black holes, and the proper- In particular the following papers are cited: ties of BPS states of supersymmetric theories with 1. Frederik Denef and Gregory W. Moore, “Split an emphasis in recent years on their wall-crossing states, entropy enigmas, holes and halos”, Journal properties and relations to hyperkähler geometry. of High Energy Physics 129 (2011), no. 11, i, 152 pp. He is a member of the American Physical Society, 2. Duiliu-Emanuel Diaconescu and Gregory W. the American Mathematical Society, the American Moore, “Crossing the wall: branes versus bundles”, Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a general mem- Advances in Theoretical Mathematical Physics 14 ber of the Aspen Center for Physics. (2010), no. 6, 1621–1650. Response from Gregory W. Moore 3. Davide Gaiotto, Gregory W. Moore, and An- drew Neitzke, “Four-dimensional wall-crossing via I am deeply honored, and not a little surprised, to three-dimensional field theory”, Communications be the sole recipient of the 2014 Leonard Eisen- in Mathematical Physics 299 (2010), no. 1, 163–224. bud Prize for Mathematics and Physics. First and 4. Davide Gaiotto, Gregory W. Moore, and An- foremost I would like to thank my collaborators, drew Neitzke, “Wall-crossing, Hitchin systems, and Frederik Denef, Emanuel Diaconescu, Davide Gaiotto, and Andrew Neitzke, for their essential the WKB approximation,” Advances in Mathematics insights and enthusiasm for what turned out to 234 (2013), 239–403. be a very fruitful line of enquiry. I was the senior 5. Davide Gaiotto, Gregory W. Moore, and An- author only in years—not infrequently it was my drew Neitzke, “Spectral networks”, Annales Henri collaborators who were leading the charge. Poincaré 14 (2013), no. 7, 1643–1731. Since the AMS has requested a response to this DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1113 award, I will use the opportunity to sketch my 406 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4 viewpoint on how the work mentioned in the Kontsevich and Yan Soibelman and separately citation fits into a broader context and then to by Dominic Joyce and Yinan Song in their work conclude even more broadly with some thoughts on generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants for on the place of physical mathematics in the con- Calabi-Yau categories. Research into BPS states temporary relation of the mathematical and physi- continues to be a very active subject. cal sciences. As indicated in the citation, the investigations A central theme of the work in the citation is the into the BPS spectrum have led to a wide variety of behavior of four-dimensional theories with N=2 unexpected and rich connections to many branches supersymmetry. The 1994 breakthrough of Nathan of pure mathematics. Like a beautiful flower Seiberg and Edward Witten amply demonstrated which continues to unfold and dazzle, the deeper that quantum field theories with extended super- the probe, the richer the emergent mathematics. symmetry constitute a Goldilocks class of theories In addition to the relations of four-dimensional which are special enough to admit exact nontrivial N=2 theories to hyperkähler geometry, cluster results on their dynamics but general enough to algebras, cluster varieties, and integrable systems, exhibit a host of nontrivial phenomena in quantum several other remarkable links to subjects in field theory. The promise of the Seiberg-Witten pure mathematics have been discovered by many breakthrough is twofold: First, one can make exact mathematicians and physicists in the past several statements about how the massless particles in the years. The full list is too long to mention here, but theory interact at low energies. Second, one can some prominent examples include deep relations make exact statements about the spectrum of the to geometric representation theory and nontrivial Hamiltonian for a subsector of the Hilbert space connections with modular tensor categories and of states called the “BPS subspace”. One of the key two-dimensional conformal field theory. features of these theories is that the vacuum state In view of the extraordinary richness of the field, is not unique, but rather it is parameterized by a one might well wonder if there is some simplifying manifold (which carries a special Kähler metric). and unifying viewpoint on all the above connec- Thus, an example of the first kind of result is an tions. Indeed, the following is widely believed by exact description of the strength of Coulomb’s law many mathematicians and physicists: A striking as a function of the vacuum parameters. prediction of string theory from the mid-1990s (in I would guesstimate that there have been well the hands of Edward Witten, Andrew Strominger, over ten thousand physicist years devoted to the and Nathan Seiberg) is that there is a class of intense investigation of four-dimensional N =2 six-dimensional interacting conformal quantum field theories. Nevertheless, the full promise of field theories known as the (2,0)-theories. Many the Seiberg-Witten breakthrough has not yet been of the beautiful connections alluded to above can fully realized. Regarding the first kind of result, be traced to the very existence of these theories. important and nontrivial insights continue to be On the other hand, these six-dimensional theories uncovered up to the present day in the works of have not yet been fully formulated in any system- Nikita Nekrasov, Samson Shatashvili, Vasily Pes- atic way. There is no analog of a statement for tun, Edward Witten, and a host of others revealing nonabelian gauge theory, such as “Make sense of relations to integrable systems and many other the path integral over connections on a principal things. The papers mentioned in the citation ad- bundle weighted by the Yang-Mills action.” Indeed dress the second kind of result: deepening our the very mention of the (2,0)-theories is greeted by understanding of how to compute the so-called BPS some scientists with an indulgent smile. But many spectrum for ever larger classes of N =2 theories. of us take them seriously. An important problem The key theme in these papers is that, as a func- for the future is a deeper understanding and for- tion of vacuum parameters, the BPS spectrum can mulation of these theories. be discontinuous across real codimension 1 loci For reviews giving a more extensive explana- in the space of vacuum parameters. An important tion of these matters, the reader could consult my point is that there exists a very beautiful formula review talk at Strings2011 in Uppsala, Sweden, my which expresses how this spectrum changes. Since review talk at the 2012 International Congress on a real codimension 1 locus is a wall, the formula Mathematics and Physics in Aalborg, Denmark, or is known as a wall-crossing formula. The history my 2012 Felix Klein lectures delivered in Bonn, of this formula is far too complicated to be ex- Germany. They are all available on my home page. plained here, but I will note that it began with a I would like to stress that there are several view- formula of Sergio Cecotti and Cumrun Vafa for the points on this vibrant subject held by several other decays of solitons in two-dimensional quantum mathematicians and physicists which are equally if field theories, and, in addition to my work done not more valid. For a good example, see the review in collaboration with Denef, Diaconescu, Gaiotto, by Yuji Tachikawa, available on his home page. and Neitzke, essential insights and breakthroughs Looking further to the future, we should not were made in the context of pure mathematics— forget that the very existence of the (2,0)-theory and motivated by pure mathematics—by Maxim is but a corollary of the existence of string theory. APRIL 2014 NOTICES OF THE AMS 407 Work on the fundamental principles underlying the AMS during 2003–2004. The Eisenbud Prize for string theory has noticeably waned—it seems the Mathematics and Physics honors a work or group community is currently gathering more “data” of works that brings the two fields closer together.
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