John Schwarz

Schwarz is a co-founder of superstring theory: through the 1970s he kept the theory alive as an attempt to unify gravity with quantum mechanics, and his 1984 anomaly-cancellation result with Michael Green triggered the 'first superstring revolution' that moved string theory to the centre of theoretical physics. He has been a professor at Caltech for decades. He was born to scientist parents who emigrated from Europe in 1940 to escape the Nazis; he is of Jewish descent.