Dr. Edward A. Mazenc

A Bit About Me

A dual French/US citizen, I was born in California, but quickly moved to France, where I grew up in a small rural village. As a teenager, I moved to Germany, where I initially went down the humanities route, before taking my first physics classes in my final two years of high-school. 

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I went back to the US for my undergraduate studies in Physics at MIT, where I worked on inflationary cosmology in the stimulating group of Profs. Alan Guth and David Kaiser. I then pursued my masters in Maths at the University of Cambridge (Gonville & Caius College), with a particular focus on geometric methods for theoretical physics. My PhD at Stanford, under the supervision of Prof. Sean Hartnoll, focused on the emergence of spacetime in low-dimensional string theories from a quantum information theoretic perspective. Sean first showed me the magic of large N gauge theories, which lie at the heart of my research today. 

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My recent work, in collaboration with Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar, begun during my first postdoctoral appointment at the University of Chicago, provided a detailed derivation of the “simplest gauge/string duality”. This establishes an exact equivalence between matrix integrals and certain topological strings. From a mathematical perspective, it provides an interesting connection between random matrix theory and intersection theory on the moduli space of curves. 

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In my current position as a long-term SwissMAP research fellow at ETH Zürich, I have joined the vibrant group of Prof. Matthias Gaberdiel to upgrade these results to the full AdS/CFT correspondence.