13 Facts About Cumrun Vafa

Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran on 1 August 1960.

Cumrun Vafa became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects.

Cumrun Vafa graduated from Alborz High School in Tehran and moved to the United States in 1977 to study at university.

Cumrun Vafa worked at Princeton University within the Institute for Advanced Study, within the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Mathematics in 1994.

Cumrun Vafa's research is primarily in string theory, and is focused on the nature of quantum gravity and the relation between geometry and quantum field theories.

Cumrun Vafa is known in the string theory community for his co-discovery with Strominger that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole can be accounted for by solitonic states of superstring theory, and for expounding the relation between geometry and field theories that arise through string dualities.

Cumrun Vafa is interested in understanding the underlying meaning of string dualities, as well as trying to apply superstring theory to some unsolved questions of elementary particle physics such as the hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem.

Cumrun Vafa has made contributions to topological string theories and to the understanding of mirror symmetry.

Cumrun Vafa is a trustee of Network of Iranians for Knowledge and Innovation.

Cumrun Vafa is the recipient of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics 's, 2008 Dirac Medal, which was won alongside Juan Maldacena, and Joseph Polchinski for their advancement of string theory.

In 2016, Cumrun Vafa was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

Cumrun Vafa was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Cumrun Vafa has co-authored and published more than 300 research articles in the fields of string theory, mathematics, and physics, with many other researchers including: Robbert Dijkgraaf, Hirosi Ooguri, Mina Aganagic, Sergei Gukov, Rajesh Gopakumar, Lotte Hollands, and many others.