Quick Facts
Biography
Jacques Distler (born 1961) is a physicist working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994.
Early life and education
Distler was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School (Snowdon).
Physics career
Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at Princeton University.
According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on conformal field theory in two dimensions. His earliest paper is Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory, co-authored with André LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B.
He has studied the "landscape" of metastable vacua in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic. Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board.
He has a blog Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth, one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.
Personal life
Distler maintains a webpage dedicated to his father, who was born in Poland and escaped the German slave camps of World War II.