Two outstanding speakers discuss their work: Professor Juan Maldacena and Dr Irene Valenzuela.
By Mr John Stevenson (Senior Communications Officer), Published
City's Department of Mathematics hosted the first in-person London Triangle seminar on 12th October 2022 since the global pandemic.
The London Triangle is a long-standing Theoretical Physics seminar series jointly organised by City, King’s College London, Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London.
During the well-attended event, the School of Science and Technology welcomed the London Theoretical physics community back to Northampton Square - including two outstanding speakers to discuss their work - Professor Juan Maldacena and Dr Irene Valenzuela
A Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton since 2001 (following a Professorship at Harvard), Professor Maldacena authored the most highly cited paper ever in high-energy physics in 1997, reshaping fundamental physics with the mathematical description of how certain theories of quantum gravity are equivalent to other quantum mechanical theories (with no gravitational force) in one fewer spacetime dimension. Among his many scientific awards are the 2004 American Physical Society Award, the 2008 ICTP Dirac Medal, the 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize, the 2018 Einstein Medal, the 2019 Galileo Galilei Medal. Founder of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics Professor Leonard Susskind defined him as “certainly the greatest theoretical physicist of his generation”.
Dr Irene Valenzuela is a young leader in the field of string theory. Her research is about finding consistency constraints dictated by the quantization of gravity on models describing particle physics, with particular focus on the guiding principles it provides to describe phenomena currently unexplained by the most successful theory of particle physics to date, the Standard Model of particle physics. After obtaining her PhD at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) in 2015, Irene continued her research at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Utrecht University, Cornell University, Harvard University and CERN, where she works at the moment while holding an assistant Professorship at UAM. In 2021 she received the Young Researcher Prize in Physics of the BBVA Foundation and the Spanish Physics Royal Society and was awarded one of the prestigious Starting Grants of the European Research Council.
Commenting on the event, Reader in Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Dr Bogdan Stefanski, said:
“The London Triangle series event was very successful, with over 100 participants and many early career researchers from across all four London institutions being able to interact and network with each other and the academic staff. It was also an excellent forum to listen to some of the most exciting and cutting-edge developments in Theoretical Physics, with Professor Maldacena's results still unpublished and to appear shortly. Dr Valenzuela gave an inspiring overview talk and left the audience asking many follow-up questions after her talk.”
For more on the London Triangle, please visit this weblink.