On the Nonlinear Stability of Slowly Rotating Kerr Black Holes
- Speaker
-
Sergiu Klainerman, Ph.D.Princeton University
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Roy Kerr’s 1963 invention of a two-parameter family of explicit, stationary, rotating asymptotically flat solutions of Einstein’s field equations in a vacuum ranks as one of the most consequential explicit mathematical solutions in all science, comparable in importance to Newton’s explicit solution of the two-body problem. The breakthrough led to the first observational discovery of black holes and the formulation of deep physical and mathematical problems. Among those problems is the stability conjecture, which states that a perturbed Kerr black hole will settle back down to a stable state.
In this lecture, mathematician Sergiu Klainerman will discuss his recent work resolving the Kerr stability conjecture for slowly rotating black holes.
About the Speaker
Klainerman received his undergraduate degree from the University of Bucharest in Romania and his Ph.D. from New York University. He was a Miller fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1978 to 1980 and returned to NYU in 1980, where he went through the ranks from assistant professor to full professor. In 1987, Klainerman joined Princeton University’s mathematics department, where he is currently the Higgins Professor of Mathematics. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Prize and the Leconte Prize of the French Academy of Sciences. Klainerman is an editor for journals such as the Annals of Mathematics and the Annals of PDE.