Sylvester James Gates

Sylvester James Gates, Jr.
Born (1950-12-15) December 15, 1950
Tampa, Florida, U.S.[1]
Nationality American
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for Supersymmetry
String Theory
Supergravity
Supersymmetry nonrenormalization theorems
Superconformal algebra
Adinkra symbols
Bihermitian manifolds
Awards Klopsteg Memorial Award (2003)
National Medal of Science (2013)
Scientific career
Fields Physics
Institutions University of Maryland, College Park
Brown University
Doctoral advisor James E. Young

Sylvester James Gates Jr. (born December 15, 1950), known as S. James Gates the 6th or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He retired from the physics department at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences in 2017,[2] and he is now the Ford Foundation Professor of Physics at Brown University.[3] He was a University of Maryland Regents Professor and served on former President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.[4]

Biography

Gates received BS (1973) and PhD (1977) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M. T. Grisaru, M. Rocek and W. Siegel, Gates coauthored Superspace, or One thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry.[5]

Gates is on the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public and is active in scientific outreach.

Gates was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010–11) and was a Residential Scholar at MIT's Simmons Hall. He is pursuing ongoing research into string theory, supersymmetry, and supergravity at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. His research focuses on Adinkra symbols as representations of supersymmetric algebras.

In 2018, Gates was elected to the presidential line of the American Physical Society: he will begin to serve as its Vice President in 2019, and president as of 2021.[6]

Awards and recognition

On February 1, 2013, Gates was a recipient of the National Medal of Science.[7] Gates was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.[8]

Gates was nominated by the Department of Energy as one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's "Nifty Fifty" Speakers to present his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010.[9] On December 5, 2016, Gates spoke at the 2016 Quadrennial Physics Congress, the largest ever gathering of physics undergraduates.

Media appearances

Recently Gates has been featured in TurboTax and Verizon commercials and has a been featured extensively on NOVA PBS programs on physics, notably "The Elegant Universe" (2003). He completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality (2006) for The Teaching Company consisting of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople.[10] During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated a ballet "The Elegant Universe", where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms connected to his scientific research.[11] Gates Appeared on the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.[12] Gates also appeared in the BBC Horizon documentary The Hunt for Higgs in 2012. Gates recently appeared in another NOVA documentary "Big Bang Machine" in 2015.

Publications

  • Superspace or 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry, (with M. T. Grisaru, M. Roček, and W. Siegel), Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company (1983), Reading, MA (On-line; http://aps.arXiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0108200).
  • L'arte della fisica superspace, Stringhe, superstringhe, teoria unificata dei campi, 2006, Di Renzo Editore, ISBN 88-8323-155-4.
  • Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck's the Higgs?, (with Steven Jacob Sekula and Frank Blitzer), YBK Publishers, Inc. (2018), New York, New York, (ISBN978-1-936411-39-9).

Notes

  1. ↑ CV
  2. ↑ Sickles, Kate. "Gates, Sylvester - UMD Physics". Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  3. ↑ "Welcoming Jim Gates, our new Ford Foundation Professor of Physics | Physics | Brown University". www.brown.edu. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  4. ↑ "UMD PCAST announcement". University of Maryland. Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  5. ↑ Gates, S. James; Grisaru, M. T.; Rocek, M.; Siegel, W. (1983). "Superspace". American Institute of Physics.
  6. ↑ "Gates elected to presidential line of the American Physical Society". Retrieved August 22, 2018.
  7. ↑ http://bigstory.ap.org/photo/barack-obama-sylvester-james-gates-0
  8. ↑ "S. James Gates". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
  9. ↑ Nifty Fifty, USA Science and Engineering Festival
  10. ↑ "Sylvester James Gates Jr. lecture". News@Concordia. Concordia University. Archived from the original on October 4, 2006.
  11. ↑ Armitage, Karole; Ligeti, Lukas; Gates, Jim. "The Elegant Universe". Science & the City Podcast. New York Academy of Sciences. Retrieved December 1, 2015.
  12. ↑ 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything on YouTube
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