12 Facts About Shahn Majid

Shahn Majid's 1995 textbook Foundations of Quantum Group Theory is a standard text still used by researchers today.

Shahn Majid pioneered a quantum groups approach to noncommutative geometry and the use of such methods as a route to quantum gravity, leading in 1994 to the first model with testable predictions of quantum spacetime.

Shahn Majid is known for a range of results in algebra and category theory, notably for his theory of braided Hopf algebras and for a new view of the octonions.

Shahn Majid grew up in Hampstead, London, where he now lives, is married to Konstanze Rietsch, a University of Vienna and MIT trained pure mathematician based at King's College London, and has two children.

Shahn Majid has been visiting professor at the Perimeter Institute, Oxford University, and Cambridge University, as well as a principal organiser along with Alain Connes and Albert Schwarz of a 6-month programme on noncommutative geometry at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2006.

Shahn Majid wrote several early papers before his more established PhD work.

Shahn Majid rapidly established himself as a leading authority on all types of quantum groups and developed a distinctive Hopf algebraic approach to them, including well-known results on the quantum double and a duality construction for a monoidal category.

Shahn Majid proved the main theorems in the field of 'transmutation' and 'bosonisation' and constructed the first and still main examples of the theory, including quantum planes as an additive braided groups.

Whether his model is confirmed or not, the most important thing, according to Shahn Majid, is that unlike much of modern theoretical physics, it is testable.

The subtle interplay between the creativity of pure mathematics and the fact-driven agenda of physics form the basis of a general philosophy of Relative Realism in which Shahn Majid argues that the nature of physical reality is not fundamentally different from the way that topics in pure mathematics are on the one hand created by definitions and on the other hand 'out there' waiting to be invented.

Shahn Majid gives the more everyday example of the way that the reality experienced in a game of chess is created by the rules of chess and the choice to abide by them while at the same time, on another level, the rules of chess were themselves a reality waiting to be discovered by those seeking to invent board games.

The general picture leads to a dualism between experiment and theory or 'principle of representation-theoretic self-duality' in which Shahn Majid argues that 'the search for the ultimate theory of physics is the search for self-dual structures in a self-dual category'.