Arthur Jaffe

File:Arthur Jaffe.jpg

Arthur Jaffe at his office

Arthur Michael Jaffe /ˈdʒæfi/ (born December 22, 1937) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor at Harvard University.

Professional career

Jaffe attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics. Currently Jaffe teaches Mathematical Physics and pursues research at Harvard University. His doctoral students include Joel Feldman, Ezra Getzler, and Clifford Taubes.

For several years Jaffe was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, and later of the American Mathematical Society. He chaired the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. He presently serves as Chair of the Board of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Theoretical Physics.

Jaffe conceived the idea of the Clay Mathematics Institute and its programs, including the employment of research fellows and the Millennium Prizes in mathematics. He served as a founding Member, a founding member of the Board, and the founding President of that organization.

Arthur Jaffe began as chief editor of Communications in Mathematical Physics in 1979 and served for 21 years until 2001.

Contributions

With James Glimm, he founded the subject called constructive quantum field theory. Their major achievement was to establish existence theorems for two- and three dimensional examples of non-linear, relativistic quantum fields.

Awards and honors

Awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1980. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Personal history

Jaffe was married from 1971 to 1992 to Nora F. Crow (aka Nora Crow Jaffe), now a Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and an authority on the 18th-century Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Nora accompanied Jaffe on most of his national and international sojourns, including his stays at the ETH in Zürich and the IHES in Büres-sur-Yvette. She gave birth to Jaffe's daughter, Margaret Collins Jaffe, on September 10, 1986 at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Margaret graduated from Middlesex School and then, in 2010, from Wellesley College. She majored in Japanese and minored in English. She now lives with her mother in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In September 1992, Jaffe married Sarah Warren, who worked in the Mathematics Department at Harvard. The marriage lasted for nine years before ending in divorce. Sarah now lives in New Hampshire with her second husband, Michael Walsh.

External links

• Jaffe's website
• Arthur Jaffe at the Mathematics Genealogy Project