Philip Candelas

Summary

Philip Candelas, FRS[5] (born 24 October 1951, London, UK)[4][6] is a British physicist and mathematician.[7][8] 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 Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.[4][9]

Philip Candelas
Born (1951-10-24) 24 October 1951 (age 72)[4]
London, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA)
University of Oxford (DPhil)
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford
University of Texas at Austin
ThesisQuantum Gravitation (1977)
Doctoral advisorDennis Sciama[1]
Doctoral studentsDavid Deutsch[2][3]
Websitewww.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/philip.candelas

Education edit

Candelas was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge and Wadham College, Oxford, where he was a student of Dennis Sciama, from 1972, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1973.[4] From 1975 he was a research fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1976-77 was at the University of Texas at Austin with John Archibald Wheeler. In 1977 he received his DPhil from Oxford for research on quantum gravity supervised by Dennis Sciama, Derek J. Raine and M. R. Brown.[10]

Career and research edit

After his DPhil, Candelas continued at the University of Texas, where he became an assistant professor in 1977, associate professor in 1983, and full professor in 1989.

He was at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1993 to 1994, a visiting scientist at CERN from 1991 to 1993 and a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1995. He was the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford from 1999 to 2020 and also the Head of the Mathematical Physics Group at Oxford.[6]

Candelas is most known for his 1985 work with Edward Witten, Andrew Strominger, and Gary Horowitz in which they introduced compactification to string theory using Calabi–Yau manifolds.[11] He also works on the geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds and relationships with number theory[citation needed] and has made fundamental contributions to mirror symmetry.

Candelas is also notable for his contributions in the field of quantum field theory (QFT) especially the renormalisation of QFT near black holes. He also contributed to the understanding of the behaviour of quantum fields near boundaries, with applications to the Casimir effect and quark confinement.[7][5]

Awards and honours edit

Candelas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2010.[5]

Personal life edit

Candelas has both British and United States citizenship. He is married to mathematics professor Xenia de la Ossa and has two daughters.[4][6]

References edit

  1. ^ Philip Candelas at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Deutsch, David Elieser (1978). Boundary effects in quantum field theory. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.453518.
  3. ^ Deutsch, David; Candelas, Philip (1979). "Boundary effects in quantum field theory". Physical Review D. 20 (12): 3063–3080. Bibcode:1979PhRvD..20.3063D. doi:10.1103/physrevd.20.3063.
  4. ^ a b c d e "CANDELAS, Prof. Philip". Who's Who. Vol. 2017 (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  5. ^ a b c Anon (2010). "Professor Philip Candelas FRS". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)

  6. ^ a b c "Philip Candelas's CV" (PDF). www.maths.ox.ac.uk.
  7. ^ a b "Professor Philip Candelas". Mathematical Institute – University of Oxford. Retrieved 15 February 2013.
  8. ^ "Scientific publications of Philip Candelas". inspirehep.net. INSPIRE-HEP.
  9. ^ Philip Candelas publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  10. ^ Candelas, Philip (1977). Quantum Gravitation. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.450645.
  11. ^ P. Candelas; Gary T. Horowitz; Andrew Strominger; Edward Witten (1985), "Vacuum configurations for superstrings", Nuclear Physics B, 258: 46–74, Bibcode:1985NuPhB.258...46C, doi:10.1016/0550-3213(85)90602-9

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