Professor Gabriele Veneziano
Prof. Gabriele Veneziano, Guest Lecturer at the Emilio Segre Distinguished Lectures in Physics Endowed by Raymond and Beverly Sackler for the academic year 2011/2012, is Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the College of France in Paris (France). He serves as a Sackler Professor by special appointment at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University.
Prof. Veneziano earned his Laurea in Theoretical Physics from the University of Florence under the direction of Raoul Gatto in 1965. After graduating, he won a scholarship of Angelo della Riccia to carry out a research in the group directed by Raoul Gatto, who had gathered in Florence a number of brilliant young theorists. He decided to pursue his doctoral studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot (Israel) and obtained his PhD in 1967 under the supervision of Hector Rubinstein. Between 1968 and 1972 he worked at MIT and CERN (Switzerland). In 1972 he became Amos de Shalit Professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and in 1976 he accepted a position in the Theory Division at CERN where he worked for more than 30 years and directed the Theory Division (between 1994 and 1997). In fall 2012, he spent a semester at New York University as Global Distinguished Professor. Since 2004 he holds the prestigious Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the Collège de France, in Paris.
As one of pioneers of the string theory, Prof. Veneziano is the recipient of several prizes and distinctions. He is fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Turin, Italy (1994); of the Lincei National Academy, Italy (1996); and the French Academy of Sciences (2002). He received the Pomeranchuk Prize (1999); the Italian Medal of Merit for Culture and Art (2000); the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics (2004); the Enrico Fermi Prize (2005); the Albert Einstein Medal (2006); the Oskar Klein Medal (2007); the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2007); James Joyce Award (2009); the Felice Pietro Chisesi and Caterina Tomassoni Prize (2009); the Dirac Medal (2014); a Honorary doctorate by Swansea University, UK (2015-8); and the Friedel-Volterra Prize (2016–2017).
Prof. Veneziano first formulated the foundations of string theory in 1968 when he discovered a string picture could describe the interaction of strongly interacting particles. He discovered that the Euler Beta function, interpreted as a scattering amplitude, has many of the features needed to explain the physical properties of strongly interacting particles. This amplitude, known as the Veneziano amplitude, is interpreted as the scattering amplitude for four open string tachyons. In retrospect this work is now considered the founding of string theory although at the time it was not apparent the string picture would lead to a new theory of quantum gravity. In 1991, he published a paper that shows how an inflationary cosmological model can be obtained from string theory, thus opening the door to a description of string cosmological pre-big bang scenarios.
