Gabriele Veneziano

Happy Birthday Gabriele Veneziano, one of the pioneers of string theory! Veneziano was born in Florence, Italy in 1942. He studied physics at the University of Florence and earned his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In 1968 he published the study “Construction of a crossing-symmetric, Regge behaved amplitude for linearly-rising trajectories.” In the paper Veneziano used an equation devised by 18th-century mathematician Leonard Euler to help describe the strong force, which holds protons and neutrons together in an atom’s nucleus. A few years later a team of physicists built on Veneziano’s work and proposed that particles could be thought of as tiny vibrating strings. String theory was born. Although most seminal work in string theory took place in the 1980s and 1990s, Veneziano provided the spark. More recently he has studied the strong force and cosmology as a professor at the Collège de France in Paris. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 7 September 1942