Soo-Jong Rey

Soo-Jong Rey calls himself a "Gedanken Experimentalist"—someone who runs experiments in his head. He's been doing that for decades now, starting with a Caltech PhD and wandering through the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Yale, Princeton, Seoul National University, and the Institute for Basic Sciences. These days, he does his wandering at Kwangwoon University in Korea, where he is a Distinguished Professor. Along the way, he's worked on quantum field theory, black holes and universes, string theory, and condensed matter physics. Lately, he's been applying all that to questions in quantum information, computing, cryptography, and AI—mostly because they're fun and nobody really knows the answers yet. A few places have given him prizes (ICTP, Bessel, Henri Poincaré, SSC), which was nice. When he's not thinking about physics, he's probably losing at Go to someone half his age.