They may be in vogue these days, but some categories of geeks still don’t get the mainstream recognition they deserve. Take physicists: let’s face it, they deal with some heady stuff that many of us can’t begin to understand. But Miriam Carothers gets it. The artist has drawn the portraits of some of the top physicists in the world, filling in their faces with equations that are relevant to the subject’s work to make them more than just your everyday caricatures. If you’re in New York, the portraits will be on display in the New York gallery Central Booking starting on February 6. Click through to see a few of our favorites.
By Miriam Carothers
Cumrun Vafa, 2008 Dirac Medal-winning string theorist from Harvard
By Miriam Carothers
Jihye Seo, researcher at DESY in Hamburg studying quantum field theories with extended supersymmetry.
By Miriam Carothers
Mina Aganagic has “made a number of major discoveries regarding the structure of topological string amplitudes and the interpretation thereof, and has more recently developed a refined version of Chern-Simons gauge theory that is of great interest mathematically.”
By Miriam Carothers
Juan Maldacena “is best known for discovering the first tractable example of the holographic principle, which ultimately developed into the larger AdS/CFT correspondence — one of the pillars of our current understanding of quantum gravity.”
By Miriam Carothers
“Among his many contributions, Alexander Polyakov did foundational work on the properties of scale-invariant systems in two dimensions as well as providing a path integral formulation of string theory.”