Professor Samson Shatashvili awarded Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics
Posted on: 25 October 2024
Prof. Samson Shatashvili, University Chair of Natural Philosophy (1847) in Trinity’s School of Mathematics, and Director of the Hamilton Mathematics Institute, was recognised for outstanding publications in the field, in which he has made several significant contributions over the past four decades.
The Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics is jointly awarded by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and American Physical Society (APS).
It has been awarded since 1959, with past recipients representing a “who’s who” of the most impactful theoretical and mathematical physicists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The citation by APS for Prof. Shatashvili’s 2025 prize reads: “For clever use of various techniques in studying symmetry in quantum field theory, in particular, for work with L. Faddeev on anomalies, with C. Vafa on exceptional holonomy compactifications of superstrings, and for the co-discovery of Bethe/gauge correspondence between supersymmetric vacua and quantum integrability.”
Samson performed the work on anomalies when he was a PhD student in the early 1980s at the St. Petersburg Steklov Mathematics Institute, and the work on exceptional holonomy manifolds when at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton in the early 1990s. The work on the last topic, mentioned in the citation, was performed at Yale and completed after moving to Trinity in the 2000s.
Interestingly, all these topics, as well as many other topics of Samson’s research, involve ideas and methods largely developed in Ireland in the 19th century, at Trinity College Dublin, by famous scientists William Rowan Hamilton and James MacCullagh. These are also the subjects in the mathematical foundations of Quantum Field Theory.
The work Samson performed at Trinity – with collaborators – and mentioned in the APS citation is about the deep connection between supersymmetric quantum field theories and quantum integrable systems.
That knowledge turned out to be a powerful tool, which is now used in the study of quantum field theory, quantum many body systems, black holes, string theory, high energy and condensed matter physics, enumerative geometry, algebraic geometry, and in many other areas of theoretical physics and pure mathematics.
Prof. Sinéad Ryan, Dean of Research at Trinity, said: “It is my great pleasure to congratulate my colleague, Samson Shatashvili, on this huge honour. The Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics is among the most prestigious prizes in theoretical and mathematical physics, and it is wonderful to see Samson’s deep and foundational contributions to this field receive such well-deserved recognition.”
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