Paul Ginsparg

Paul Ginsparg is a Professor of Physics at Cornell University. He received an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1981. After his doctorate, Ginsparg was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1981 to 1984. He then served as Assistant Professor of Physics at Harvard University from 1984 to 1986 and Associate Professor of Physics from 1986 to 1990. From 1990 to 2001, he held the position of Technical Staff Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, during which time he founded arXiv in 1991, the preeminent open-access preprint repository. Since 2001, he has been Professor of Physics, Computer Science, and Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. He also holds visiting appointments at institutions including C.E.N. Saclay in France, Princeton University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at UC Berkeley, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Ginsparg's research interests include theoretical elementary particle physics, quantum field theory, and digital knowledge networks. He has employed techniques from statistical mechanical models, particularly the Potts spin glass, to study community detection in networks. These methods have led to new algorithms for clustering arXiv.org subject areas using full-text similarities, co-author networks, citation networks, and co-readership collaborative filtering. Additionally, Ginsparg has contributed to quantum computing and quantum information, including simulations of statistical mechanical models on 20- and 65-qubit machines. His distinguished career has been recognized with several honors: Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1986-1990), DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator (1986-1991), Fellowship of the American Physical Society, MacArthur Fellowship (2002), Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2008-2009), Einstein Foundation Berlin Award, and Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics. Ginsparg is also a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Radcliffe Institute.

Professional Email: ginsparg@cornell.edu