Claus Montonen received his MSc from the
University of Helsinki in 1968 and his PhD at the
University of Cambridge in 1974, where he was taught by David Olive before he left for CERN. He held research fellowships at
Orsay,
CNRS and
CERN. From 1974 he has held various research and teaching positions at the
University of Helsinki and
Helsinki Institute of Physics.
Publications In 1977 while at CERN Montonen, together with Olive, made the remarkable conjecture that there should exist an electromagnetic
dual theory in which the roles of
magnetic monopoles and
gauge bosons are interchanged. The
Montonen-Olive duality was later found to emerge from a deeper web of dualities underlying
M-theory, ushering in the
second superstring revolution of the mid 1990s, through the work of
Ed Witten and others. ==References==