Demetrios Christodoulou Explained

Demetrios Christodoulou
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Birth Date:19 October 1951
Birth Place:Athens, Greece
Workplaces:
Alma Mater:Princeton University
Doctoral Advisor:John Archibald Wheeler
Doctoral Students:
Awards:

Demetrios Christodoulou (Greek, Modern (1453-);: Δημήτριος Χριστοδούλου; born 19 October 1951[1]) is a Greek mathematician and physicist, who first became well known for his proof, together with Sergiu Klainerman, of the nonlinear stability of the Minkowski spacetime of special relativity in the framework of general relativity. Christodoulou is a 1993 MacArthur Fellow.

Early life

Christodoulou was born in Athens and received his doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1971 under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler. After temporary positions at Caltech, CERN, and the Max Planck Institute for Physics, he became professor of mathematics, first at Syracuse University, then at the Courant Institute, and at Princeton University, before taking up his last position as professor of mathematics and physics at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.[1] He is emeritus professor since January 2017. He holds dual Greek and U.S. citizenship.

Achievements

See also: Gravitational memory effect. In 1993, he published a book[2] coauthored with Klainerman in which their proof of the stability result is laid out in detail. In that year, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 1991, he published a paper[3] which shows that the test masses of a gravitational wave detector suffer permanent relative displacements after the passage of a gravitational wave train, an effect which has been named "nonlinear memory effect". In the period 1987–1999 he published a series of papers on the gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric self-gravitating scalar field and the formation of black holes and associated spacetime singularities.[4] [5] [6] He also showed that, contrary to what had been expected, singularities which are not hidden in a black hole also occur.[7] However, he then showed that such "naked singularities" are unstable.[8] In 2000, Christodoulou published a book[9] on general systems of partial differential equations deriving from a variational principle (or "action principle"). In 2007, he published a book[10] on the formation of shock waves in 3-dimensional fluids. In 2009 he published a book[11] where a result which complements the stability result is proved. Namely, that a sufficiently strong flux of incoming gravitational waves leads to the formation of a black hole. In 2019 he published a book[12] which addresses the development of shocks past the point of formation by studying a free boundary problem with singular initial conditions.

Awards

Christodoulou is a recipient of the Bôcher Memorial Prize,[13] a prestigious award of the American Mathematical Society. The Bôcher Prize citation mentions his work on the spherically symmetric scalar field as well as his work on the stability of Minkowski spacetime. In 2008, he was awarded the Tomalla prize in gravitation.[14] In 2011, he and Richard S. Hamilton won the Shaw Prize in the Mathematical Sciences,[15] "for their highly innovative works on nonlinear partial differential equations in Lorentzian and Riemannian geometry and their applications to general relativity and topology". The citation for Christodoulou mentions his work on the formation of black holes by gravitational waves as well as his earlier work on the spherically symmetric self-gravitating scalar field and his work with Klainerman on the stability of Minkowski spacetime. Christodoulou is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.[16] In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[17] In 2014 he was a plenary speaker at the ICM in Seoul. Since 2016, he is also a member of the Academia Europaea.[18] In 2021, he was awarded the Henri Poincaré Prize.[19]

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Demetrios Christodoulou Curriculum Vitae. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. 13 April 2010.
  2. Book: Christodoulou, Demetrios . Klainerman, Sergiu. The global nonlinear stability of the Minkowski space. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1993. 0-691-08777-6.
  3. D. Christodoulou. Nonlinear nature of gravitation and gravitational-wave experiments. Phys. Rev. Lett.. 67. 1486–1489. 1991. 1991PhRvL..67.1486C. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.67.1486. 12. 10044168.
  4. D. Christodoulou. A mathematical theory of gravitational collapse. Commun. Math. Phys.. 109. 613–647. 1987. 1987CMaPh.109..613C. 10.1007/BF01208960. 4. 122366693.
  5. D. Christodoulou. The formation of black holes and singularities in spherically symmetric gravitational collapse. Commun. Pure Appl. Math.. 44. 339–373. 1991. 10.1002/cpa.3160440305. 3.
  6. D. Christodoulou. Bounded variation solutions of the spherically symmetric Einstein-scalar field equations. Commun. Pure Appl. Math.. 46. 1131–1220. 1993. 10.1002/cpa.3160460803. 8.
  7. D.Christodoulou. Examples of naked singularity formation in the gravitational collapse of a scalar field. Ann. Math.. 140. 607–653. 1994. 10.2307/2118619. 3. 2118619.
  8. D. Christodoulou. The instability of naked singularities in the gravitational collapse of a scalar field. Ann. Math.. 149. 183–217. 1999. 10.2307/121023. 1. 121023. math/9901147. 8930550.
  9. Book: Christodoulou, Demetrios. The action principle and partial differential equations. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 2000. 0-691-04957-2.
  10. Book: Christodoulou, Demetrios. The formation of shocks in 3-dimensional fluids. Zurich. European Mathematical Society Publishing House. 2007. 978-3-03719-031-9.
  11. Book: Christodoulou, Demetrios. The formation of black holes in general relativity. Zurich . European Mathematical Society Publishing House. 2009. 978-3-03719-068-5.
  12. Book: Christodoulou, Demetrios. The shock development problem. Zurich . European Mathematical Society Publishing House. 2019. 978-3-03719-192-7.
  13. Web site: 1999 Maxime Bôcher Memorial Prize. American Mathematical Society. 8 August 2005.
  14. Web site: The Tomalla Foundation. 13 February 2008.
  15. Shaw Laureates – 2011 – Mathematical Sciences. Shaw Prize. 7 June 2011. 26 May 2024. https://archive.today/20240526062858/https://www.webcitation.org/6Ag4R2zSl?url=http://www.shawprize.org/en/shaw.php%3Ftmp=3.
  16. Web site: News from the National Academy of Sciences. NAS Members and Foreign Associates Elected. https://web.archive.org/web/20120504002407/http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2012_05_01_NAS_Election.html. 4 May 2012. 1 May 2012.
  17. https://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
  18. Web site: Academy of Europe: Mathematics Members .
  19. Web site: Henri Poincaré Prize – 2021 Prize recipients. icmp2021.com. 4 August 2021.