Presidential Young Investigator Award: Theoretical Physics

Research will be carried out at the boundary between quantum field theory and mathematics. The work will include studies of conformal field theory, lattice models which replace the continuum of space by a discrete set of points, quantum groups, quantum gravity, von Neumann algebras, Teichmuller space, and other topics. The work, to be carried out by one of the new Presidential Young Investigators for 1990, is important to our effort to understand gravity in the context of quantum theory and to the furthering of the growing, fruitful interaction between physics and mathematics.