Nabil Iqbal, Ph.D.

Nabil Iqbal is a professor of mathematical and theoretical physics at Durham University. Iqbal works on a wide variety of topics in theoretical physics and has made contributions to problems in string theory, quantum field theory, gravity and statistical physics. One of his main interests is holographic duality: the idea that a quantum theory of gravity is exactly equivalent to a theory of particles living in one lower dimension. Iqbal has worked extensively on applications of holographic duality, connecting the physics of black holes to that of strongly correlated liquids and understanding holographic measures of quantum entanglement. He has also applied new symmetry principles from quantum field theory to the hydrodynamics of plasmas and the classification of the phases of matter. More recently, he has begun to study applications of machine learning to problems in statistical physics. In general, he is very interested in scientific problems that live at the intersections of different fields.

Iqbal will use the Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship to lay the foundations of a research program in machine learning, working on a project on geometric deep learning with his mentor Erik Bekkers at the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab. Iqbal plans to build a new class of neural networks whose architecture encodes the symmetries of conformal invariance, a powerful symmetry group that appears in many places in nature. He hopes that this new class of networks will have applications to problems in computer vision and the characterization of three-dimensional data.