Distler was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School (Snowdon) along with noted Pediatric Researcher Daniel Wechsler.^{[citation needed]} He attended Harvard University, also with Dan Wechsler, for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis Compactified String Theories was supervised by Sidney Coleman.^[1]

Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at Princeton University.

According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on conformal field theory 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" of metastable vacua in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic.^[2] Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board.^{[3][failed verification]}

He has a blog Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth, one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.^{[citation needed]}

Distler maintains a webpage dedicated to his father, who was born in Poland and escaped the German slave camps of World War II.

• 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.

• Faculty homepage
  • Musings, the blog of Jacques Distler
• INSPIRE-HEP publication list^{[permanent dead link]}
• Google-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
• Jacques Distler at the Mathematics Genealogy Project