Luboš Motl
Luboš Motl is a Czech theoretical physicist. He was an assistant professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications were focused on string theory.Life and career
Motl was born in Plzeň, present-day Czech Republic. He won a Bronze Medal at the 1992 International Mathematical Olympiad. He received his master's degree from the Charles University in Prague, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Rutgers University and has been a Harvard Junior Fellow and assistant professor at Harvard University. In 2007, he left Harvard and returned to the Czech Republic.
Although an undergraduate at a Czech university where none of the faculty specialized in string theory, Motl came to the attention of string theorist Thomas Banks in 1996, when Banks read an arXiv posting by Motl on matrix string theory. "I was at first a little annoyed by paper, because it scooped me," said Banks. "This feeling turned to awe when I realized that Lubos was still an undergraduate". He then became a graduate student of Banks, and wrote his PhD thesis on matrix theory. While at Harvard, Motl worked on the pp-wave limit of AdS/CFT correspondence, twistor theory and its application to gauge theory with supersymmetry, black hole thermodynamics and the conjectured relevance of quasinormal modes for loop quantum gravity, deconstruction, and other topics. In 2006, he proposed the Weak Gravity Conjecture with Nima Arkani-Hamed, Alberto Nicolis and Cumrun Vafa. He is the author of L'équation Bogdanov, a 2008 French-language book discussing the scientific ideas and controversy of the Bogdanov brothers.
