Cumrun Vafa

Born in Tehran and educated at Alborz High School, he moved to the United States in 1976, took a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at MIT, and completed his doctorate at Princeton University under Edward Witten, with a dissertation on symmetries, inequalities and index theorems. ¹

After his doctorate he joined Harvard as a junior fellow, received a senior faculty position in 1989, and has remained there, holding the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy and, from October 2025, a Timken University Professorship. His work includes the Strominger–Vafa counting of black hole microstates, the geometric engineering of quantum field theories and the Gopakumar–Vafa invariants; in 1997 he developed F-theory. He shared the 2008 Dirac Medal and the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and received the Dannie Heineman Prize in 2016 and the Mustafa Prize in 2021. ^{1 2}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The Persian article says the 2021 Mustafa Prize was presented to him among Muslim scientists from the Islamic Republic of Iran — the framing of a prize for scientists of the Muslim world rather than a statement of his personal affiliation; the English article lists the same prize without describing his affiliation, the Arabic text and the English categories name no religion, and Wikidata carries no religion value. No school or affiliation is named anywhere, so no value is recorded. ^{2 1 3}

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