Witten was born on August 26, 1951, in
Baltimore,
Maryland, to a
Jewish family,[8] as the eldest of four children. His brother
Matt Witten became a highly successful writer, and his brother Jesse Amnon Witten became a law partner in the firm
Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath.[9] The three brothers' sister Celia M. Witten earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University[10] and then an M.D. from the University of Miami.[11] Edward Witten is the son of Lorraine (née Wollach) Witten[12] and
Louis Witten, a
theoretical physicist specializing in
gravitation and
general relativity.[13]
Witten attended the
University of Michigan for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out.[18] He returned to academia, enrolling in
applied mathematics at
Princeton University in 1973, then shifting departments and receiving a
PhD in physics in 1976 and completing a dissertation, "Some problems in the short distance analysis of gauge theories", under the supervision of
David Gross.[19] He held a fellowship at
Harvard University (1976–77), visited
Oxford University (1977–78),[3][20] was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–1980), and held a
MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).[4]
Although he is definitely a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows) his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians, and his ability to interpret physical ideas in mathematical form is quite unique. Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems ... He has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics.[5]
By the mid 1990s, physicists working on
string theory had developed five different consistent versions of the theory. These versions are known as
type I,
type IIA,
type IIB, and the two flavors of
heterotic string theory (
SO(32) and
E8×E8). The thinking was that of these five candidate theories, only one was the actual correct
theory of everything, and that theory was the one whose low-energy limit matched the physics observed in our world today.[30]
Speaking at the string theory conference at
University of Southern California in 1995, Witten made the surprising suggestion that these five string theories were in fact not distinct theories, but different limits of a single theory, which he called
M-theory.[31][32] Witten's proposal was based on the observation that the five string theories can be mapped to one another by certain rules called
dualities and are identified by these dualities. It led to a flurry of work now known as the
second superstring revolution.[30]
Other work
Another of Witten's contributions to physics was to the result of gauge/gravity duality. In 1997,
Juan Maldacena formulated a result known as the
AdS/CFT correspondence, which establishes a relationship between certain
quantum field theories and theories of
quantum gravity.[33] Maldacena's discovery has dominated high-energy theoretical physics for the past 15 years because of its applications to theoretical problems in quantum gravity and quantum field theory. Witten's foundational work following Maldacena's result has shed light on this relationship.[34]
With
Anton Kapustin, Witten has made deep mathematical connections between S-duality of gauge theories and the
geometric Langlands correspondence.[38] Partly in collaboration with Seiberg, one of his recent interests includes aspects of field theoretical description of topological phases in condensed matter and non-supersymmetric dualities in field theories that, among other things, are of high relevance in condensed matter theory. In 2016, he has also brought tensor models to the relevance of holographic and quantum gravity theories, by using them as a generalization of the
Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model.[39]
Witten has published influential and insightful work in many aspects of quantum field theories and mathematical physics, including the physics and mathematics of anomalies, integrability, dualities, localization, and homologies. Many of his results have deeply influenced areas in theoretical physics (often well beyond the original context of his results), including string theory, quantum gravity and topological condensed matter.[40]
Witten sits on the board of directors of
Americans for Peace Now and on the advisory council of
J Street.[55] He supports the
two-state solution and advocates a boycott of Israeli institutions and economic activity beyond its 1967 borders, though not of Israel itself.[56] Witten lived in Israel for a year in the 1960s.[57]
Green, M.,
John H. Schwarz, and E. Witten. Superstring Theory. Vol. 1, Introduction. Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
ISBN978-0-521-35752-4.
Green, M., John H. Schwarz, and E. Witten. Superstring Theory. Vol. 2, Loop Amplitudes, Anomalies and Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
ISBN978-0-521-35753-1.
Quantum fields and strings: a course for mathematicians. Vols. 1, 2. Material from the Special Year on Quantum Field Theory held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, 1996–1997. Edited by
Pierre Deligne,
Pavel Etingof,
Daniel S. Freed,
Lisa C. Jeffrey,
David Kazhdan,
John W. Morgan,
David R. Morrison and Edward Witten. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI; Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, NJ, 1999. Vol. 1: xxii+723 pp.; Vol. 2: pp. i–xxiv and 727–1501.
ISBN0-8218-1198-3, 81–06 (81T30 81Txx).
^
ab"Edward Witten". Institute for Advanced Study. December 9, 2019. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
^
abcAtiyah, Michael (1990).
"On the Work of Edward Witten"(PDF). Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. pp. 31–35. Archived from
the original(PDF) on March 1, 2017.
^Parker, Thomas H. (1985). "Gauge choice in Witten's energy expression". Communications in Mathematical Physics. 100 (4): 471–480.
doi:
10.1007/BF01217725.
ISSN0010-3616.
^
abRickles, Dean (August 23, 2016). A Brief History of String Theory. Springer.
ISBN978-3-662-50183-2.
^Witten, E. (March 13–18, 1995).
Some problems of strong and weak coupling. physics.usc.edu. Future Perspectives in String Theory. Los Angeles: University of Southern California. Retrieved February 1, 2023.