Public Biography
Dr. Helene Marquardt is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University, where she holds the Enrico Fermi Chair in Particle Theory. Her research focuses on quantum field theory, gauge symmetry, and the mathematical structure of the Standard Model. She has published more than ninety peer-reviewed papers and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Dr. Marquardt received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 and completed postdoctoral work at CERN before joining the Columbia faculty in 2006. She was part of the theoretical team whose predictions were confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, an achievement she has described as “gratifying, though I would note that the particle did all the hard work of existing.”
She is the author of Symmetry and Structure: An Introduction to Gauge Theory for the Curious (Oxford University Press, 2018), which was intended as a popular science book but which reviewers noted “becomes impenetrable by page forty, at which point Dr. Marquardt appears to forget she is not writing for graduate students.”
Dr. Marquardt lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and serves on the advisory board of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — explained that the easy problems are gone because they were solved, and that in the standard formulation they are called the first ones
Articles
- Einstein's Great-Great-Granddaughter Sues Every Physicist Since 1905 for Plagiarism — The complaint, which runs to 4,211 pages, names approximately 40,000 defendants and describes the entire field of modern physics as 'a group project where only one person did the work.'
- Physicist Who Refuses to Read Philosophy Has Spent Eleven Years Deriving It From First Principles, Arriving at 1785 — Asked whether he had considered simply reading Kant, Dr. Ruhl said that reading Kant would be assuming the conclusion.
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”