Jacques Distler (born January 1, 1961) is a Canadian-born American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

working in

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 interac ...

. He has been a professor of

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

since 1994.

Early life and education

Distler was born to a Jewish family in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

, Canada, where he attended

Herzliah High School United Talmud Torahs of Montreal ( he, הַמְאוּחָדִים בְּמוֹנְטְרִיאָל בּ‬ָ‬תֵי תַלְמוּד תוֹרָה‬, french: Talmud Torahs Unis de Montréal) (also known as The Azrieli Schools, in French: Les é ...

(

Snowdon Snowdon () or (), is the highest mountain in Wales, at an elevation of above sea level, and the highest point in the British Isles outside the Scottish Highlands. It is located in Snowdonia National Park (') in Gwynedd (historic ...

). He attended

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis ''Compactified String Theories'' was supervised by

Sidney Coleman Sidney Richard Coleman (7 March 1937 – 18 November 2007) was an American theoretical physics, theoretical physicist noted for his research in high-energy theoretical physics. Life and work Sidney Coleman grew up on the Far North Side o ...

Physics career

Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on

conformal field theory A conformal field theory (CFT) is a quantum field theory that is invariant under conformal transformations. In two dimensions, there is an infinite-dimensional algebra of local conformal transformations, and conformal field theories can sometimes ...

in two dimensions. His earliest paper is ''Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory,'' co-authored with André LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B. He has studied the "

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

" of

metastable In chemistry and physics, metastability denotes an intermediate Energy level, energetic state within a dynamical system other than the system's ground state, state of least energy. A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of me ...

vacua A vacuum is a space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective ''vacuus'' for "vacant" or "void". An approximation to such vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressure. Physicists often dis ...

in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic. Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board.arXiv advisory board
/ref> He has a

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

''Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth,'' one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.

Personal life

Distler maintains
webpage
dedicated to his father, who was born in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

and escaped the German slave camps of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Notes

References

* A. LeClair and J. Distler, ''Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory'', Nucl. Phys. B273 (1986) 552. * J. Distler and H. Kawai, ''Conformal Field Theory and 2-D Quantum Gravity or Who's Afraid of Joseph Liouville?'', Nucl. Phys. B321 (1989) 509.

External links

Faculty homepage

Musings
the blog of Jacques Distler
INSPIRE-HEP publication listGoogle-Scholar publication list
for some reason this gives slightly lower citation counts than INSPIRE, for example INSPIRE gives 907 citations for one paper while Google-Scholar gives a figure of 800 * {{DEFAULTSORT:Distler, Jacques 1961 births Living people Harvard College alumni Scientists from Montreal American string theorists University of Texas at Austin faculty 21st-century American physicists Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni