Werner Nahm

Werner Nahm
Werner Nahm in 2004
Born	(1949-03-21)21 March 1949
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	University of Bonn, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Alma mater	Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 1970
Doctoral students	Katrin Wendland, Katrin Becker and Melanie Becker
Known for	Nahm equations
Influenced	graded Lie algebras, Yang–Mills theory, magnetic monopoles, supersymmetry, supergravity, string theory,

Werner Nahm (born 21 March 1949 in Münster (Selters), Germany) is a German theoretical physicist, with the status of professor. He has made contributions to mathematical physics and fundamental theoretical physics.

Werner Nahm attended Gymnasium Philippinum Weilburg. After high school he studied from 1966 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he earned his diploma in physics in 1970. He received his doctorate in 1972 at the University of Bonn, his dissertation was titled Analytical solution of the statistical bootstrap model, where he was then to 1975 as a post-doctoral student. From 1976 to 1982 he was a scientist at CERN.

From 1982 he was a Heisenberg fellow again at the University of Bonn. In 1986 he became associate professor at the University of California, Davis. 1989 to 2002 he was a full professor at the University of Bonn. Since 2002 he is one of three senior professors at the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and since 2007 its director. He is a foreign member of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

In the 1970s he worked with elementary theory, for example, bootstrap models (the subject of his dissertation) and the classification of graded Lie algebras, which are important in supersymmetric theories. After that, he worked mainly on the theory of magnetic monopoles, classification of supersymmetric models, conformal field theories and their algebraic classification, and classification of string models. The Nahm equations (1981) are named after him, used in (for example) for the description of monopoles in Yang–Mills theories, and the Nahm transform.