Who is Juan Maldacena, the prodigy scientist who will receive the UNC Honoris Causa?

Juan Maldacena (50 years old) will receive the title of doctor honoris causa from the National University of Córdoba on Tuesday. His name is unknown to ordinary people, but he is a celebrity in the world of physics and a serious candidate to receive a Nobel Prize.

Maldacena studied at the University of Buenos Aires and then at the Balseiro Institute of Bariloche. He continued his research in the United States, where he worked until now at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

He was the youngest professor of life at Harvard University. It is an old scientist: it uses only pencil and paper, chalk and chalkboard.

The act of the Honoris Causa will take place Tuesday at 11:30 in the auditorium of the Faculty of Dentistry (University City). Maldacena will give a lecture entitled: "Black Holes and the Space-Time Structure.

Theory of everything

It works on a "theory of everything", with the aspiration to bring together in a single framework the theories of quantum mechanics (which explains the atomic world) and of general relativity or universal gravitation (which explains the cosmic world of the stars). and galaxies).

Maldacena was the first physicist to give a hypothetical solution to part of this unification. The principle was called Maldacena conjecture.

The book was published in 1997. Currently, this article has been cited in more than 17 thousand paper, which is one of the most famous texts of physics.

His ideas fit into string theories, the most accepted conceptions for achieving this paradigm shift.

He badumes that the essential matter of the Universe are the strings, whose vibration defines the characteristics of each subatomic particle.

This hypothesis, not yet demonstrated empirically, implies the existence of other dimensions and a holographic universe.

Road to the Nobel

In 2012, Maldacena was awarded the Yuri Milner Prize for Fundamental Physics for three million dollars (twice as much as a Nobel Prize). Part of the money was donated to the Balseiro Institute to promote the visit of foreign scientists.

In 2018, he received the Lorentz Medal, awarded every four years by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands to the world's most renowned physicists. His porters almost always receive the Nobel Prize in physics later.

This year, he also received the Galileo Galilei Medal, presented for the first time by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) of Italy, in collaboration with the Galileo Galilei Institute (GGI), in Florence.