Cumrun Vafa (born 1960) is a theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Cumrun Vafa was born August 1960. He became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects He received a B.S. in mathematics and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1985 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled “Symmetries, inequalities and index theorems”, under the supervision of Edward Witten.