Stanley Deser

Stanley Deser
Born	1931 Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine)
Residence	Pasadena, California, U.S.
Citizenship	American
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	California Institute of Technology, Brandeis University
Alma mater	Harvard University (Ph.D. 1953)
Doctoral advisor	Julian Seymour Schwinger
Notable students	Lee Smolin, Kellogg Stelle, Richard Woodard
Known for	ADM formalism, quantum gravity, supergravity, conformal anomaly, 2+1 dimensional gravities and Chern–Simons quantum field theory, partially massless systems in anti-de Sitter space
Notable awards	Einstein Medal, Dannie Heineman Prize, Guggenheim Fellow,Fulbright Fellow, Fellow of the American Physical Society, National Academy of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Italy

Stanley Deser (born 1931) is an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. Currently, he is emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a Senior Research Associate at California Institute of Technology.

Deser earned his B.A. (Summa cum laude) in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953, with an article entitled "Relativistic Two Body Interactions". From 1953 to 1955, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1955 to 1957, and a Lecturer at Harvard from 1957 to 1958. He was an Invited Professor at the Sorbonne during 1966-7 and 1971-2, he held a visiting professorship at All Souls College in Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lectureship at Harvard in 1975.

In the context of general relativity, he developed, with Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner, the ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing spacetime as space evolving in time, which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass (so-called ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. With L. Abbott, Deser extended the notion of energy for gravity with a cosmological constant. And with Claudio Teitelboim he showed that supergravity has positive energy.

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