Howard Mason Georgi III, born January 6, 1947 in
San Bernardino, CaliforniaSan Bernardino is a city located in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area , and serves as the county seat of San Bernardino County, California, United States...
, is Harvard College Professor and
MallinckrodtMallinckrodt is a set of pharmaceutical, chemical, imaging, and respiratory equipment suppliers based in the St. Louis, Missouri, area. Founded in 1867 when the Mallinckrodt brothers formed G. Mallinckrodt & Company to manufacture pharmaceutical chemicals, Mallinckrodt was purchased by Tyco...
Professor of
PhysicsPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He is best known for early work in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU(5) and SO(10) groups (see
Georgi-Glashow modelIn particle physics, the Georgi–Glashow model is a particular grand unification theory proposed by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow in 1974. In this model the standard model gauge groups SU×SU×U are combined into a single simple gauge group -- SU...
).
Georgi has for many years taught an advanced freshman physics course, "Physics 16" in the fall semester. He is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Physics and has been Co-Master of
Leverett HouseLeverett House is the largest of twelve residence houses for upperclass undergraduates at Harvard University...
with his wife, Ann Blake Georgi, since 1998. He graduated from Harvard College in 1967 and obtained his Ph.D. from
Yale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
in 1971. He was Junior Fellow in the
Harvard Society of FellowsThe Harvard Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginning of their careers by Harvard University for extraordinary scholarly potential, upon whom distinctive academic and intellectual opportunities are bestowed in order to foster their individual growth and intellectual...
from 1973-1976 and a Senior Fellow from 1982-1998. In 1995 he was elected to the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
and received the
Sakurai PrizeThe J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, is presented by the American Physical Society at its annual "April Meeting", and honors outstanding achievement in particle physics theory...
; in 2000 he shared the Dirac Medal with
Jogesh PatiJogesh C. Pati is an Indian American theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park.-Biography:...
and
Helen QuinnHelen Rhoda Quinn is an Australian-born particle physicist. She went to school in Victoria, Australia and entered college at the University of Melbourne before moving to the USA and transferring to Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1967, at a time when less than 2% of...
. He has advised a number of notable students, including Andrew G. Cohen,
Adam FalkAdam Falk is the 17th president of Williams College. He is a theoretical physicist by training and previously served as the James B. Knapp Dean at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.-External links:*...
, Benjamin Grinstein,
John HagelinJohn Samuel Hagelin is an American particle physicist, three-time candidate of the Natural Law Party for President of the United States , and the director of the Transcendental Meditation movement for the US....
, Lawrence J. Hall,
David B. KaplanDavid B. Kaplan is the director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington. He earned his B.S. in 1980 from Stanford University, Ph.D...
, Michael Luke, Aneesh Manohar,
Ann NelsonThis article is for Ann Elizabeth Nelson the physicist, not actress Ann Nelson who played Mrs. Berg on Fame . Ann Elizabeth Nelson is a particle physicist at the University of Washington. She was a student of Howard Georgi and has been a member of the university's Particle Theory Group since 1994...
,
Brian GreeneBrian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds...
, Sally Dawson and
Lisa RandallLisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist and a leading expert on particle physics and cosmology. She works on several of the competing models of string theory in the quest to explain the fabric of the universe. Her most well known contribution to the field is the Randall-Sundrum model,...
.
Georgi proposed an SU(5) GUT model with softly broken supersymmetry with
Savas DimopoulosSavas Dimopoulos is a Greek particle physicist at Stanford University. He was born in Istanbul, Turkey and later moved to Athens due to ethnic tensions in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. Dimopoulos studied as an undergraduate at the University of Houston...
in 1981. This paper is one of the foundational works for the
supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM)The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model is the minimal extension to the Standard Model that realizes supersymmetry, although non-minimal extensions do exist. Supersymmetry pairs bosons with fermions; therefore every Standard Model particle has a partner that has yet to be discovered...
. After the measurements of the three Standard Model gauge couplings at LEP I in 1991, it was shown that particle content of the MSSM, in contrast to the Standard Model alone, led to precision gauge coupling unification.
He has since worked on several different areas of physics including composite Higgs models, heavy quark effective theory,
dimensional deconstructionIn theoretical physics, dimensional deconstruction is a method to construct d-dimensional theories that behave as higher-dimensional theories in a certain range of energies...
,
little HiggsIn particle physics, little Higgs models are based on the idea that the Higgs boson is a pseudo-Goldstone boson arising from some global symmetry breaking at a TeV energy scale...
, and
unparticleIn theoretical physics, Unparticle physics is a speculative theory that conjectures matter that cannot be explained in terms of particles using the Standard Model of particle physics, because its components are scale invariant....
theories.
Unparticle physics is a theory that there exists matter that cannot be explained in terms of particles, because its components are scale invariant. Howard Georgi proposed this theory in the spring of 2007 in the papers "Unparticle Physics" and "Another Odd Thing About Unparticle Physics".
Together with Vadim Alexeevich Kuzmin, Georgi received the
Pomeranchuk PrizeThe Pomeranchuk Prize is an international award for theoretical physics, awarded annually since 1998 by the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics from Moscow...
of the
Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental PhysicsThe Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics is located in Moscow, Russia as a MinAtom physical institute....
(ITEP) in 2006.
Georgi has published several books, the best known of which is
Lie Algebras in Particle Physics published by World Scientific. He has also published
The Physics of Waves and
Weak Interactions and Modern Particle Theory.
External links