>>11181446Here are just a few of the things he did in the 80s that have nothing to do with string theory or topology. As the decades go on it gets harder for me to follow his papers.
He invented supersymmetric quantum mechanics, which breathed some new life into ordinary undergraduate quantum mechanics (you can apply it to the harmonic oscillator, hydrogen atom, etc)
He helped come up with the Witten-Veneziano mechanism which explains why a real world particle called the eta meson has the mass it does (this was a puzzle for a lot of people in the 70s)
He invented the Wess-Zumino-Witten model, which is a field theory that has all sorts of applications in condensed matter
He brought back an idea by someone named Skyrme that protons and neutrons and related particles (baryons) are really topological defects kind of like magnetic monopoles in a quark condensate field
