Samson Shatashvili


Samson Lulievich Shatashvili is a theoretical and mathematical physicist who has been working at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, since 2002. He holds the Trinity College Dublin Chair of Natural Philosophy and is the director of the Hamilton Mathematics Institute.. He is also affiliated with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, where he held the Louis Michel Chair from 2003 to 2013 and currently holds the Israel Gelfand Chair. Prior to moving to Trinity College, he was a professor of physics at Yale University from 1994.

Background

Shatashvili received his PhD in 1984 at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Saint Petersburg under the supervision of Ludwig Faddeev. The topic of his thesis was on gauge theories and had the title "Modern Problems in Gauge Theories". In 1989 he received D.S. degree also at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Saint Petersburg.

Contributions and awards

Shatashvili has made several discoveries in the fields of theoretical and mathematical physics. He is mostly known for his work with Ludwig Faddeev on quantum anomalies, with Anton Alekseev on geometric methods in two-dimensional conformal field theories, for his work on background independent open string field theory, with Cumrun Vafa on superstrings and manifolds of exceptional holonomy, with Anton Gerasimov on tachyon condensation, with Andrei Losev, Nikita Nekrasov and Greg Moore on four dimensional analogs of two dimensional conformal field theories, as well as for his work with Nikita Nekrasov on quantum integrable systems. In particular, Shatashvili and Nikita Nekrasov discovered the gauge/Bethe correspondence. In 1995 he received an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award of the Department of Energy and a NSF Career Award and from 1996 to 2000 he was a Sloan Fellow. Shatashvili is the member of the Royal Irish Academy and the recipient of the 2010 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal as well as the Ivane Javakhishvili State Medal, Georgia. In 2009 he was a plenary speaker at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Prague and in 2014 was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul.