Peter Freund
| Peter G. O. Freund | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
September 7, 1936 Timişoara, Kingdom of Romania |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | University of Chicago |
| Alma mater | Institutul Politehnic Timişoara, Romania University of Vienna, Austria |
| Doctoral advisor | Walter Thirring |
| Notable students | William Cottrell |
| Known for | Two-component duality Higher-dimensional unification Freund–Rubin compactification Superstrings from 26 dimensions p-adic strings |
| Spouse | Lucy Freund |
| Children | Pauline and Caroline |
Peter George Oliver Freund (born 7 September 1936) is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Chicago. He has made important contributions to particle physics and string theory. He is also active as a writer.
Peter George Oliver Freund was born, raised and educated in the Romanian city of Timişoara. Because of his participation in an anti-Soviet demonstration in November 1956, Freund was arrested by the communist security police, the Securitate, and lined up with other students between a wall and a line of tanks, essentially an armored firing squad, which, in the reigning confusion, did not fire.
In 1959 he managed to leave Romania. Freund obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, with Walter Thirring as his thesis adviser. Since 1965 Freund has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife Lucy, a clinical psychologist. They have two daughters, both married (Pauline, an attorney in Seattle and Caroline, an economist in Washington, D.C.), as well as five grandchildren.
Freund was one of the originators of two-component duality which gave the original impetus to what then developed into string theory. He pioneered the modern unification of physics through the introduction of extra dimensions of space and found mechanisms by which the extra dimensions curl up.
...
Wikipedia