Gary T. Horowitz (born April 14, 1955 in Washington, D.C.) is an American theoretical physicist who works on

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...

and

quantum gravity Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics; it deals with environments in which neither gravitational nor quantum effects can be ignored, such as in the vi ...

Biography

Horowitz studied at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

(Bachelor 1976) and obtained his Ph.D. in 1979 at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

with

Robert Geroch Robert Geroch (born 1 June 1942 in Akron, Ohio) is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked prominently on general relativity and mathematical physics and has promoted the use of category theor ...

. Subsequently, he was a post-doc at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

and

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

(as a NATO Fellow). In 1981-1983 he worked as an Einstein Fellow at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

. He became an Assistant Professor in 1983, Associate Professor in 1986, and finally Professor in 1990 at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Horowitz investigates gravitational phenomena, such as black holes, in string theory. In the 1990s, he worked with, among others,

Andrew Strominger Andrew Eben Strominger (; born 1955) is an American theoretical physicist who is the director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. He has made significant contributions to quantum gravity and string theory. These include his ...

and

Joseph Polchinski Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. (; May 16, 1954 – February 2, 2018) was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. (1929 ...

showing that string theory provides a description of the quantum microstates of certain black holes (following earlier work of Strominger and

Cumrun Vafa Cumrun Vafa ( fa, کامران وفا ; born 1 August 1960) is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Early life and education Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran ...

). In 1985 Horowitz published an influential paper with

Philip Candelas Philip Candelas, (born 24 October 1951, London, UK) is a British physicist and mathematician. After 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, he served as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford until 2020 and is a Fe ...

and

Edward Witten Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, q ...

on the compactification of superstrings in Calabi-Yau spaces. In the early 1990s, Horowitz and Strominger found black brane solutions in string theory. Horowitz also works on the

AdS/CFT correspondence In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, sometimes called Maldacena duality or gauge/gravity duality, is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter ...

and (together with Sean Hartnoll and Chris Herzog) discovered holographic

superconductors Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike ...

. In 1982 Horowitz and M. Perry won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition. From 1985 to 1989 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 1993 he was awarded the Xanthopoulos Prize. He has been a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its mot ...

since 2001, Member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

since 2010, and

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

since 2013.

Selected papers

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References

External links

UCSB website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Horowitz, Gary 1955 births Living people 21st-century American physicists American string theorists Princeton University alumni University of Chicago alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences