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On the work of Graeme Segal
Abstract
This is my written Laudatio for Graeme Segal on receiving the Chern Medal at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians. I make some general remarks about Segal's qualities as a mathematician. Then I discuss the origins of his work on classifying spaces of categories and Gamma-spaces. In the last section I describe his axiom system for Wick-rotated quantum field theory and some of his subsequent work in the area. Of course, this is necessarily only a small slice of Segal's total research output.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{freed2026work,
title = {{On the work of Graeme Segal}},
author = {Daniel S. Freed},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.19012},
eprint = {2610.19012},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19012},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - On the work of Graeme Segal
AU - Daniel S. Freed
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.19012
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19012
AB - This is my written Laudatio for Graeme Segal on receiving the Chern Medal at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians. I make some general remarks about Segal's qualities as a mathematician. Then I discuss the origins of his work on classifying spaces of categories and Gamma-spaces. In the last section I describe his axiom system for Wick-rotated quantum field theory and some of his subsequent work in the area. Of course, this is necessarily only a small slice of Segal's total research output.
ER -