Alan Guth

Alan Guth
Guth at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2007
Born	Alan Harvey Guth (1947-02-27) February 27, 1947 (age 77) New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Cosmic inflation Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem Inflaton
Spouse	Susan Tisch ​ (m. 1971)​
Children	2, including Larry Guth
Awards	MIT School of Science Prize for Undergraduate Teaching Oskar Klein Medal (1991) Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics of the Franklin Institute Institute of Physics Isaac Newton Medal (2009) Dirac Prize of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2004) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012) Kavli Prize (2014)
Scientific career
Fields	Cosmology, theoretical physics, particle physics
Institutions	Princeton Columbia Cornell Stanford Linear Accelerator MIT
Doctoral advisor	Francis E. Low

Alan Harvey Guth (/ɡuːθ/; born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is the Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with Alexei Starobinsky and Andrei Linde, he won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation."^[1] Guth's research focuses on elementary particle theory and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe.

He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.

As a junior particle physicist, Guth developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980.^[2][3] Moving on to the SLAC Theory Group at Stanford University, Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density (negative vacuum pressure). The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling.