Steven Gubser ’94 *98

Steven died Aug. 3, 2019, while rock-climbing in Chamonix, France. He was a professor and associate chair of physics at Princeton.

Steven was born in Tulsa, Okla., May 4, 1972, and raised in Aspen, Colo. While attending Cherry Creek High School in Denver, he received the highest individual score in the 1989 International Physics Olympiad.

Steven was valedictorian of the Princeton Class of 1994. After a Fulbright fellowship at Cambridge University, he returned to Princeton for his Ph.D. His dissertation included seminal papers in string theory that related quantities in Einstein’s gravity to quantum field theory and helped establish the field called anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theory correspondence.

After one and a half years in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Steven joined the Princeton faculty in 2000 and received tenure in 2001. He was also full professor at Caltech in 2001 while on leave from Princeton. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Blavatnik Award, a Gribov Medal, and a Simons Investigator Award.

Steven’s popular science books include The Little Book of String Theory (2010) and The Little Book of Black Holes (2017, with Frans Pretorius), both published by Princeton University Press.

He is survived his wife, Laura Landweber ’89; and their daughters, Cecily, Heidi, and Lillian.