Professor Philip Candelas FRS
Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
In his early work Candelas made important and technically challenging contributions to the understanding of the renormalisation of quantum field theory near black holes and the behaviour of quantum fields near boundaries, with applications to the Casimir effect and quark confinement. His subsequent work on higher dimensional field theories and superstring theory has proved to be of great importance. In a renowned paper with Horowitz, Strominger and Witten, he constructed the first potentially viable model of superstring theory in four space-time dimensions, making use of Calabi-Yau spaces. This work has become the foundation for the large amount of subsequent activity in this area of theoretical physics and has also had a deep and pervasive influence on differential and algebraic geometry. Candelas's pioneering work on Mirror Symmetry has also been particularly influential. Not only is Candelas one of the world's experts relating Calabi-Yau spaces to physics, but his work on their relation to number theory is of mathematical significance.