Daniel Freedman

Daniel Zissel Freedman, an American theoretical physicist of Jewish background, studied at Wesleyan and Wisconsin and spent his career at Stony Brook, MIT and Stanford. In 1976, with Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, he co-invented supergravity, a theory that unites Einstein's general relativity with supersymmetry. Supergravity has become central to superstring theory and to the search for physics beyond the Standard Model; for it he received the Dirac Medal in 1993 and the Special Breakthrough Prize in 2019.