View source for Jacques Distler

{{Infobox scientist
| name              = Jacques Distler
| birth_date        = {{birth date and age|1961|01|01|mf=yes}}
| birth_place       = [[Montreal]], [[Quebec]], Canada
| death_date        =
| death_place       = 
| field             = [[physics]], [[string theory]]
| work_institutions = [[University of Texas at Austin]]
| alma_mater        = [[Harvard University]] and [[Herzliah High School (Snowdon)]]
}}
'''Jacques Distler''' (born January 1, 1961) is a Canadian-born American [[physicist]] working in [[string theory]]. He has been a professor of [[physics]] at the [[University of Texas at Austin]] since 1994.

==Early life and education==
Distler was born to a Jewish family in [[Montreal]], [[Quebec]], Canada, where he attended [[Herzliah High School]] ([[Snowdon, Montreal|Snowdon]]) along with noted Pediatric Researcher Daniel Wechsler.{{cn|date=May 2022}}  He attended [[Harvard University]], also with Dan Wechsler, for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis ''Compactified String Theories'' was supervised by [[Sidney Coleman]].<ref>{{MathGenealogy|id=93820|title=Jacques Joseph Distler}}</ref>

==Physics career==
Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at [[Princeton University]].

According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on [[conformal field theory]] in two dimensions.  His earliest paper is ''Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory,'' co-authored with André LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B.

He has studied the "[[string theory landscape|landscape]]" of [[Metastability|metastable]] [[False vacuum|vacua]] in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic.<ref>[https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507090 Random polynomials and the friendly landscape] July 2005, arXiv.org</ref>  Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board.<ref>[https://arxiv.org/help/physics/#AdvisoryCommittee arXiv advisory board]</ref>{{failed verification|date=April 2018}}

He has a [[blog]] ''Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth,'' one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.{{citation needed|date=July 2018}}

==Personal life==
Distler maintains a [http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/shoah/ webpage] dedicated to his father, who was born in [[Poland]] and escaped the German slave camps of [[World War II]].

== Notes ==
{{reflist}}

== References ==
* A. LeClair and J. Distler, ''Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory'', Nucl. Phys. B273 (1986) 552.
* J. Distler and H. Kawai, ''Conformal Field Theory and 2-D Quantum Gravity or Who's Afraid of Joseph Liouville?'', Nucl. Phys. B321 (1989) 509.

==External links==
*[http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/ Faculty homepage]
**[http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/ Musings], the blog of Jacques Distler
*[https://archive.today/20121215023006/http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/spiface/find/hep/www?rawcmd=fin+au+distler,j INSPIRE-HEP publication list]
*[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=J.+Distler&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en Google-Scholar publication list], for some reason this gives slightly lower citation counts than INSPIRE, for example INSPIRE gives 907 citations for one paper while Google-Scholar gives a figure of 800
*{{MathGenealogy|id=93820}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Distler, Jacques}}
[[Category:1961 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Harvard College alumni]]
[[Category:Scientists from Montreal]]
[[Category:American string theorists]]
[[Category:University of Texas at Austin faculty]]
[[Category:21st-century American physicists]]
[[Category:Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni]]