Grothendieck & ’t Hooft: Dessins d’Enfant from AdS/CFT

In later life, Alexander Grothendieck was captivated by simple graphs encoding holomorphic maps to the sphere. He called them dessins d’enfants—“children’s drawings”. Decades earlier, Gerard ’t Hooft noted that the 1/N expansion in gauge theory mirrors the genus expansion in string theory. Dr Edward Mazenc shows how recent work on AdS/CFT reveals Grothendieck’s insight as the simplest form of gauge–string duality.

Dr Edward Mazenc is a research fellow at ETH Zurich. He did his PhD at Stanford and was a Kadanoff Fellow at the University of Chicago. He studied at MIT and Cambridge. His research explores the insights that gauge/string duality offers into the fundamental structure of spacetime.