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Paul Ginsparg

American physicist (born 1955)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ1931745 ↗
Source-derived summary

Paul Henry Ginsparg is an American physicist. He developed the arXiv.org e-print archive.

Education

He is a graduate of Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, on Long Island. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in physics and from Cornell University with a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical particle physics with a thesis titled Aspects of symmetry behavior in quantum field theory.

Career in physics

Ginsparg was a junior fellow and taught in the physics department at Harvard University until 1990.

The pre-print archive was developed while he was a member of staff of Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1990–2001. Since 2001, Ginsparg has been a professor of Physics and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University.

He has published physics papers in the areas of quantum field theory, string theory, conformal field theory, and quantum gravity. He often comments on the changing world of physics in the Information Age.

Awards

He has been awarded the P.A.M. (Physics-Astronomy-Math) Award from the Special Libraries Association, named a Lingua Franca "Tech 20", elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, received the Council of Science Editors Award for Meritorious Achievement, and received the Paul Evans Peters Award from Educause, ARL, and CNI.

He was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2008–2009.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Paul Ginsparg” as american physicist (born 1955). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990, 2001, 2002, 2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1955-01-01. The account is most persuasive where Paul, Ginsparg and American can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american physicist (born 1955). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1931745. VIAF identifies the subject as 48490574. The Library of Congress control number is n96032220. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2001, 2002 and 2008.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Paul Ginsparg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.