Wadham Professor of Mathematics elected as Fellow of the Royal Society

The Royal Society has elected 51 new Fellows for their outstanding contributions to science.

Among them is Wadham's Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Luis Fernando Alday.

Fernando Alday is best known for two transformative advances connecting several branches of physics and mathematics. The first is a duality relating scattering amplitudes in strongly coupled theories to minimal surfaces/soap bubbles in anti-de-Sitter space and uncovered a surprising mathematical structure in the form of new symmetries and dualities.

The second is the AGT (Alday, Giotto and Tachikawa) correspondence, which relates four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories to two dimensional conformal field theories. More recently, Fernando has been developing mathematical tools to compute string and M-theory amplitudes in curved space-time, a subject still in its infancy.

Also elected was Susan Lea who was a Fellow at Wadham before recently moving on.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.

For the full announcement from the Royal Society, click below.