By Nikita Nekrasov
Professor of Physics, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics
Founded in 1477, Uppsala University is the oldest university in Northern Europe. The tradition of conferring honorary degrees goes back to the same time yet a different place (Oxford University). It is a tremendous honor to join a long line of scholars linking the centers of knowledge mining and knowledge transfer throughout the globe. In the volatile present, with the world being torn apart by differences in moral philosophy, a hope for a path to a peaceful future is in the natural philosophy.
My connection to Uppsala University started thirty years ago. I visited the Physics Department there while studying for my undergraduate degree. My first physics publication lists Uppsala as my home institution. In fact, it was at Uppsala that I got interested in the connection between integrability and supersymmetry. Together with A. Gorsky we then stumbled upon a curious case of a correspondence between the many-body quantum mechanical Calogero-Moser-Sutherland system of particles and two dimensional Yang-Mills theory, which was shown by E. Witten a year earlier to be amenable to supersymmetric localization. Many years later this developed into the BPS/CFT-correspondence, a very active area of research at the interface of quantum gauge theory, probability theory, integrability, representation theory, differential and algebraic geometry, topology, and string theory.
The unity of physics and mathematics, revealed in such correspondences, teaches us something very deep about Nature and about the nature of us, the conscient observers.
The ceremony of conferring the honorary degree took place on January 26, 2024, with speeches in Latin and peaceful canon fire.
Prior to the ceremony I gave a popular lecture titled “Natural language: Geometry and Physics,” at the inauguration of the Center for Geometry and Physics at Uppsala University. It was a beautiful moment celebrating the entangled history of research and educational institutions, with old traditions being open to accommodating new ones. The Uppsala Center for Geometry and Physics is founded with the help of the Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Research Council, by Professors Tobias Ekholm and Maxim Zabzine. It counts many past members and visitors of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics on its faculty.