Professor Fernando Alday FRS

Fernando Alday is renowned for the development of mathematical tools to understand fundamental questions in Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity. His most important contributions involve surprising dualities among different theories and observables in high energy theoretical physics, which had a transformative effect on their areas. One of these dualities relates scattering amplitudes to minimal surfaces/soap bubbles in anti-de-Sitter space. This uncovered surprising mathematical structures in the form of new symmetries for amplitudes. Another duality, known as the AGT correspondence, relates correlation functions in a two-dimensional theory to the spectrum of four-dimensional gauge theories. This groundbreaking correspondence has connected several branches of physics and mathematics. More recently, Fernando has been developing mathematical tools to compute string and M-theory amplitudes in curved space-time, a subject still in its infancy.

Fernando is a recipient of the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Merit Award and the LMS Whitehead prize. Since 2020 he is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and head of the Mathematical Physics Group at the University of Oxford.