>>11540902Vafa is a string theory behemoth. this is a Vafa board. Joe is dead, F. Lenny is a string elder god but he is mostly acting through his students nowadays. Juan is super important and a string master but works on “extensions” like AdS/CFT. Polyakov made contributions to ST but he worked in many other fields like plain QFT and chaos/turbulence stuff. Nima doesn’t work directly on string theory really, and neither does Lisa.
Ed has really been the trendsetter for most of the core string theory topics. he really set the bar after the first generation of string theorists, and remains the person everyone listens to. even very stringt guys who rose after him, take e.g. Nati Seiberg and Petr Horava, worked basically with him
