In memoriam: Joe Polchinski

[Infopoint]

Dear Colleagues,

On Tuesday 20 March at 15:45, ICTP's Spring School on Superstring Theory 
and Related Topics will hold a memorial session in honour of the 
prominent theoretical physicist Joe Polchinski, who passed away in 
February 2018.

All are invited to attend. The 45-minute session will take place in the 
Budinich Lecture Hall, and will feature a brief overview of his 
oeuvreand tributes from his colleagues including Atish Dabholkar (ICTP), 
Ken Intriligator (UC San Diego), Igor Klebanov (Princeton), and Fernando 
Quevedo (ICTP).

Polchinski was a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical 
Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He made wide 
ranging contributions to string theory and quantum field theory. His 
most influential work was his discovery of D-branes as a class of 
membranes in string theory which are crucial for establishing the 
existence of duality symmetries of string theory. D-branes have since 
led to deep and far-reaching  insights about the structure of gauge 
theories, string theory and black holes,  and have contributed to very 
fruitful interactions between physics and mathematics.

In 2008, he shared ICTP's Dirac Medal with Juan Maldacena and Cumrun 
Vafa 
<https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/the-dirac-medal/the-medallists/dirac-medallists-2008.aspx> 
for their fundamental contributions to superstring theory. According to 
their award citation, the three scientistsprofound achievements have 
helped to address outstanding questions like confinement of quarks and 
QCD mass spectrum from a new perspective and have found applications in 
practical calculations.

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