Gerardus 't Hooft

Gerard 't Hooft at Harvard University

Gerardus ("Gerard") 't Hooft (born July 5, 1946) is a professor in theoretical physics at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is a 1999 Nobel Prize laureate "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". Asteroid 9491 Thooft is named in his honor; he has written a constitution for its future inhabitants.

Important discoveries

• A proof that gauge theories are renormalizable
• Other results about gauge theory, confinement, and anomalies
• The topological expansion of large N gauge theories that was recently proved important in the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory
• 't Hooft magnetic loop (related to Wilson loop by S-duality)
• Instanton contributions to interactions of fermions ('t Hooft interaction)
• Holographic principle (with Lenny Susskind) and other proposals about quantum gravity
• Recent attempts to revive hidden variables in quantum mechanics

External links

• Nobel Archive 1999
• Homepage G. 't Hooft