Robbert Dijkgraaf

Robbert Dijkgraaf (born 24 January 1960) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. At the Institute for Advanced Study he is the director and the Leon Levy professor.

Quotes

 * The last two years have seen the emergence of a beautiful new subject in mathematical physics. It manages to combine a most exotic range of disciplines: two-dimensional quantum field theory, intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, integrable hierarchies, matrix integrals, random surfaces, and many more. The common denominator of all these fields is two-dimensional quantum gravity or, more general, low-dimensional string theory.


 * Mirror symmetry is concerned with counting the number of holomorphic curves on Calabi-Yau manifolds, i.e. compact Kähler manifolds X with trivial canonical bundle KX.


 * I would be willing to bet that whatever formulations of quantum field theory we have now are preliminary ...
 * (quote at 7:18 of 21:39)