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 cau ...

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 intera ...

. He has been a professor of

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, 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 whi ...

at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

since 1994.

Early life and education

Distler was born to a Jewish family in

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School (

Snowdon Snowdon (), or (), is a mountain in Snowdonia in North Wales. It has an elevation of above sea level, which makes it both the highest mountain in Wales and the highest in the British Isles south of the Scottish Highlands. Snowdon i ...

) along with noted Pediatric Researcher Daniel Wechsler. He attended

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, also with Dan Wechsler, for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis ''Compactified String Theories'' was supervised by Sidney Coleman.

Physics career

Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. 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 sometime ...

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 human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes th ...

" of

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

vacua 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 Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

''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 extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

and escaped the German slave camps of

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

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