Duke University's Robert Bryant, the J.M. Kreps Professor of mathematics, whose work reaches into the higher dimensions of geometry, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
A Duke faculty member since 1987, Bryant was elected May 1 to join the elite society of approximately 2,000 scholars whose advice has been sought by U.S. leaders since its founding in 1863.
Specifics about his selection will not be revealed until the academy's next annual meeting, in spring 2008. But Bryant suspects it is probably connected to his work in differential geometry that has turned out to have connections with "superstring" theorists.
A major focus of many physicists and mathematicians, the concept of superstrings has been proposed to bridge a gap that currently separates Einstein's General Theory of Relativity from the rules of quantum mechanics.
In efforts that began in the 1980s, Bryant was able to show that certain difficult-to-construct geometrical configurations likely exist in the 7th and 8th dimensions. "My work showed that not only did these things exist, but they can exist in abundance," he said.
Bryant also studies something called isometric embedding. "Imagine you live on a world and want to know what it is shaped like, but you can't see the shape because your world is surrounded by fog," he said. "All you can do is travel around on the surface and measure how far two points are away from each other.
"If you want to know whether your world is flat or spherical or cylindrical or whatever, you can't easily tell. The differential equations that need to be solved are notoriously difficult in higher dimensions," he said.
The son of farming parents, Bryant grew up in Kipling, N.C., about 30 miles south of Raleigh, and got his undergraduate degree at North Carolina State University and his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"When I was a kid I hated arithmetic," he admits. But that was before he got hold of his uncle's college algebra and calculus texts. "I thought it was just the greatest stuff," he recalls.
After receiving his doctorate, Bryant spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He then taught at Rice University until coming to Duke.
Besides mathematics, he has an interest in music that began in his youth when he sang in his church choir and learned to play the church piano. "I can now sight-read most popular sheet music," he said. "But my greatest challenges are the kinds of polyphonic playing that you get in Bach or late Beethoven."
Until recently, he also directed the Chamber Arts Society of Durham at Duke.