Draft:David Ridout

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. ~2026-34675-69 (talk) 15:49, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

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David Ridout is an Australian mathematical physicist and professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on conformal field theory, representation theory, vertex operator algebras, Lie superalgebras, and integrable models. He is known for contributions to the mathematical foundations of logarithmic conformal field theory and related areas of mathematical physics.

Education and career

Ridout received a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Mathematics and Physics from Murdoch University in 1998, followed by a Master of Science in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia in 2001. He completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Adelaide in 2005 under the supervision of Peter Bouwknegt.

Following his doctorate, Ridout held postdoctoral positions at Université Laval in Canada and DESY in Hamburg, Germany. He subsequently served as a CRM Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal and taught at McGill University. From 2010 to 2016 he was an Australian Research Fellow at the Australian National University. In 2016 he joined the University of Melbourne, where he was later awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.

Ridout has also held visiting appointments as Simons–CRM Professor at the Université de Montréal and has served as Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Mathematical Physics.

Research

Ridout's research lies at the intersection of mathematics and theoretical physics. His work investigates the mathematical structures underlying two-dimensional conformal field theories, particularly logarithmic conformal field theories. He has contributed to the study of vertex operator algebras, affine Kac–Moody algebras and superalgebras, modular tensor categories, and representation theory.

Among his research interests are fractional-level Wess–Zumino–Witten models, quantum Hamiltonian reduction, mock modular forms, and non-semisimple tensor categories. His publications have addressed the representation theory of vertex operator superalgebras and the mathematical foundations of logarithmic conformal field theories.

Awards and honours

In 2023, Ridout received the Rodney Baxter Prize for Mathematical Physics, awarded by the Australian Mathematical Society for an outstanding and internationally significant contribution to mathematical physics carried out primarily in Australia or New Zealand.

Selected publications

• Ridout, D. (2012). "Non-Chiral Logarithmic Couplings for the Virasoro Algebra".
• Ridout, D.; Snadden, J.; Wood, S. (2018). "An admissible level osp(1|2)-model: modular transformations and the Verlinde formula". Letters in Mathematical Physics.
• Creutzig, T.; Liu, T.; Ridout, D.; Wood, S. (2019). "Unitary and non-unitary N=2 minimal models".