Arlie Petters
| Arlie Petters | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Arlie Oswald Petters February 8, 1964 Stann Creek Town, British Honduras (now Dangriga, Belize) |
| Alma mater |
City University of New York Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisors |
Bertram Kostant David Spergel |
| Known for | Mathematical Theory of Gravitational Lensing |
| Notable awards | Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship NSF CAREER Award Blackwell-Tapia Prize Most Excellent Order of the British Empire |
Arlie Oswald Petters, MBE (born February 8, 1964) is a Belizean-American mathematical physicist, who is the Benjamin Powell Professor and Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Business Administration at Duke University. Petters is a founder of mathematical astronomy, focusing on problems connected to the interplay of gravity and light and employing tools from astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, high energy physics, differential geometry, singularities, and probability theory. His monograph "Singularity Theory and Gravitational Lensing" is the first to develop a mathematical theory of gravitational lensing. He was Chairman of the Council of Science Advisers to the Prime Minister of Belize (2010-2013).
Petters was raised by his grandparents in the rural community of Stann Creek Town, British Honduras (now Dangriga, Belize). His mother immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, and married a U.S. citizen, with Arlie joining them when he was 14 years old.
Petters earned a B.A./M.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Hunter College, CUNY in 1986 with a thesis on "The Mathematical Theory of General Relativity", and began his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Mathematics in the same year. After two years of doctoral studies, he became an exchange scholar in the Princeton University Department of Physics in absentia from MIT. Petters earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1991 under advisors Bertram Kostant (MIT) and David Spergel (Princeton University). He remained at MIT for two years as an instructor of pure mathematics (1991-1993) and then joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Department of Mathematics. He was an Assistant Professor at Princeton for five years (1993-1998) before moving to Duke University.
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