Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler (born 1961) is a physicist currently working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994. Before this he was assistant professor at Princeton University. His father was born in Poland and escaped the German slave camps of World War II.

According to citation counts, his single 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 Andre LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B.

Recently he has studied the "landscape" of metastable vacua in string theory.His paper on this topic, "Random polynomials and the friendly landscape," was co-authored with Uday Varadarajan in July 2005, and is available on the arXiv as hep-th/0507090 [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507090] .

He is also known for his blog "Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth," one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.

Professor Distler is also a graduate of prestigious Herzliah High School (Snowdon) in Montreal, Canada. Other famous graduates of Herzliah High School include Billy Wisse (Emmy Award winner for Jeopardy), Ernest Block MD (trauma surgeon), and Steven Garellek (international tax attorney).

Jacques Distler is a current member of arXiv's physics advisory board [http://arxiv.org/ad-board.html] .

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.
*J. Distler and U. Varadarajan, "Random Polynomials and the Friendly Landscape", arXiv hep-th/0507090, 8 July 2005 [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507090] .

External links

* [http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/ Musings] , the blog of Jacques Distler
* [http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/spiface/find/hep/www?rawcmd=fin+au+distler%2Cj SPIRES publication list]
* [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=J.+Distler&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en Google-Scholar publication list] , for some reason this gives slightly lower citation counts than SPIRES, for example SPIRES gives 907 citations for one paper while Google-Scholar gives a figure of 800
* [http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/ Jacques Distler's Home Page] at the University of Texas