DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS

Biography

Eric Zaslow received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1995. After a postdoctoral position in mathematics at Harvard, he joined the faculty of the Northwestern mathematics department in 1998. He served as the department chair from 2018 to 2021. In 2022, Zaslow was appointed as the Henry Sanborn Noyes Chair in Mathematics.

Zaslow’s research addresses mathematical questions arising from duality symmetries in physics, especially string theory and mirror symmetry. In this context, he has studied linkages between sheaf theory, symplectic topology and cluster varieties.

Zaslow was named an Alfred P. Sloan fellow in 2000, a Clay Senior Scholar in 2004 and a Simons Fellow in 2012. He was elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2021. Zaslow has held distinguished visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences of UBC and the University of California, Berkeley, among other places.

Zaslow has been involved in several efforts to broaden participation in mathematics. He helped create the Evanston Math Circle, the Weinberg College Bridge Program, and the Causeway Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program. Zaslow’s teaching was recognized by a Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching award in 2001 and a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence in 2012.