Daniel Z. Freedman
Daniel Z. Freedman (born 1939, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American theoretical physicist. He is a Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work in supergravity.
Education
Daniel Freedman completed his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and completed his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1980 and joint Professor of Physics in 2001. Before joining MIT, he was a professor at Stony Brook University.
Supergravity
In 1976, Daniel Z. Freedman codiscovered (with Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen) supergravity. Freedman, van Nieuwenhuizen and Ferrara were on the faculty of the Stony Brook University. Supergravity, which generalizes Einstein's theory of general relativity by incorporating the then-new idea of supersymmetry, quickly became a pillar of theoretical physics. In the following decades its many implications for physics beyond the Standard Model, for superstring theory and for mathematics have become more and more evident, so that now, nearly thirty years later, supergravity is as much a subject of interest as ever. For his work on supergravity, Freedman, a former Sloan and twice Guggenheim fellow, received in 1993 the Dirac Medal and Prize, gave the 2002 Andrejewski Lectures in Mathematical Physics, and received in 2006 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics (like the Dirac Medal together with Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen) "for constructing supergravity."[1]
Research interests
Daniel Freedman is a professor at the MIT. His research is in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and superstring theory with an emphasis on the role of supersymmetry. His most recent area of concentration is the AdS/CFT correspondence in which results on the strong coupling limit of certain 4-dimensional gauge theories can be obtained from calculations in classical 5-dimensional supergravity.