Demetrios Christodoulou
| Demetrios Christodoulou | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
October 19, 1951 Athens, Greece |
| Residence | Greece, Switzerland |
| Citizenship | Greek, U.S. |
| Nationality | Greek |
| Fields | Mathematics, Physics |
| Institutions |
Princeton University Caltech CERN Syracuse University Courant Institute ETH Zurich |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | John Archibald Wheeler |
| Doctoral students | Jerrold Garcia, Fadi Twainy, Gilbert Weinstein, Longdong Qiu, Anthony Rizzi, Mihalis Dafermos, Enno Lenzmann, Lydia Bieri, Johannes Sauter, Ivo Kaelin, Shuang Miao |
| Known for | hyperbolic partial differential equations, general relativity, fluid mechanics |
| Notable awards |
Otto Hahn Medal (1981) MacArthur Fellows Award (1993) Bôcher Memorial Prize (1999) Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001) Tomalla Foundation Prize (2008) Shaw Prize (2011) Member of U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2012) |
Demetrios Christodoulou (Greek: Δημήτριος Χριστοδούλου; born October 19, 1951) 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 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 current position as Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He holds dual Greek and U.S. citizenship.
In 1993, he published a book coauthored with Klainerman in which the extraordinarily difficult 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 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. He also showed that, contrary to what had been expected, singularities which are not hidden in a black hole also occur. However, he then showed that such "naked singularities" are unstable. In 2000, Christodoulou published a book on general systems of partial differential equations deriving from a variational principle (or "action principle"). In 2007, he published a book on the formation of shock waves in 3-dimensional fluids. In 2009 he published a book 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.
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