18 Facts About David Olive

David Olive was professor of physics at Imperial College, London, from 1984 to 1992.

David Olive was awarded the Dirac Prize and Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 1997.

David Olive was a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

David Olive was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, and appointed CBE in 2002.

David Olive was born in Middlesex in 1937 and educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh and Edinburgh University.

David Olive then moved to St John's College, Cambridge, obtaining his PhD under the supervision of John Taylor in 1963.

David Olive married Jenny in 1963; they had 2 daughters and a granddaughter.

In 1971, David Olive made what he has described as a "momentous personal decision" to sacrifice his tenured position in Cambridge and move to the Theory Division, CERN as a fixed-term staff member.

David Olive was part of a team assembled by Daniele Amati to work on the theory originally known as the dual resonance model but shortly to be recognised as string theory.

In CERN, David Olive began the collaborations with the circle of string theorists many of whom feature in his memoir From Dual Fermion to Superstring.

David Olive was one of the first to become convinced of the conceptual revolution whereby string theory is viewed as a unified theory of all particle interactions, including gravity, rather than simply as a model of hadrons.

In 1977, David Olive returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at Imperial College, becoming Professor in 1984 and Head of the Theoretical Physics Group in 1988.

David Olive had by now begun collaboration with Peter Goddard and together they produced a series of papers on the mathematical foundations of string theory, notably on Virasoro and Kac-Moody algebras and their representations and relation to vertex operators.

In subsequent work with Ed Witten, David Olive showed that this duality is realised in a certain class of supersymmetric theories.

In 1992, David Olive left Imperial to take up a research professorship in mathematics and physics at Swansea University, where together with Ian Halliday he built the theoretical particle physics group.

David Olive continued to work on mathematical physics, exploring the deep symmetries underlying quantum field theories, especially affine Toda theory.

David Olive's retirement was marked by a conference "Strings, Gauge Fields and Duality" held in his honour in Swansea in 2004.

David Olive presented the Dirac Lecture at DAMTP on 14 June 2004 titled The Eternal Magnetic Monopole.