Richard Samuel Ward | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1951-09-06)6 September 1951 (age 73)[2] |
| Education |
|
| Known for | Ward construction[3] Ward's conjecture Penrose–Ward correspondence Penrose–Ward transform |
| Awards | Whitehead Prize (1989) Fellow of the Royal Society (2005) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | University of Durham |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Penrose[1] |
| Doctoral students | Paul Sutcliffe |
| Website | www |
Richard Samuel WardFRS (born 6 September 1951) is a Britishmathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical & Theoretical Particle Physics at theUniversity of Durham.[4]
Ward earned his Ph.D. from theUniversity of Oxford in 1977, under the supervision ofRoger Penrose. He is most famous for his extension of Penrose'stwistor theory to nonlinear cases, which he withMichael Atiyah used to describeinstantons by vector bundles on the three-dimensional complexprojective space. He has related interests in the theory ofmonopoles,topologicalsolitons andskyrmions.
Ward was awarded theWhitehead Prize in 1989 for his work in mathematical physics.[5] He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2005.[6] His certificate of election reads:
Richard Ward is distinguished for pioneering and elegant research in mathematical physics. He adapted thetwistor transform to theself-dualYang-Mills (SDYM) equation, and with Atiyah constructed general multi-instanton solutions. His discovery of the toroidalBPS two-monopole was a breakthrough insoliton theory. He showed that virtually all knownintegrable equations arise from SDYM by dimensional and algebraic reductions, allowing a unified solution method. Ward's twistor transform of SDYM, applied tostring theory, is leading to striking progress in quantum Yang-Mills theory.[7]
