String Theory Ph.D. Barton Zwiebach Lecture 1

Barton Zwiebach (born October 4, 1954) is a string theorist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, born in Lima, Perú. His undergraduate work was in Electrical Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Peru, from which he graduated in 1977. His graduate work was in physics at the California Institute of Technology. Zwiebach obtained his Ph.D. in 1983, working under the supervision of Murray Gell-Mann. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and at MIT, where he became an assistant professor of physics in 1987, and a permanent member of the faculty in 1994. He is one of the world's leading experts in string field theory. He wrote the textbook, "A First Course in String Theory" (2004, ISBN 0-521-83143-1), meant for undergraduates.