Demetrios Christodoulou

Demetrios Christodoulou (1982)

Demetrios Christodoulou ( Greek Δημήτριος Χριστοδούλου Dimitrios Christodoulou , born October 19, 1951 in Athens ) is a Greek mathematician and physicist .

life and work

Christodoulou came from a middle class family (his father came from a Cypriot family and was born in Alexandria) with no academic background. He studied physics at Princeton University after his physical and mathematical talent was recognized by Achille Papapetrou (who examined him in Paris with John Archibald Wheeler ), and received his Master of Arts (MA) there in 1970 . A year later he did his Ph.D. in physics with John Archibald Wheeler at the same university ( Investigations in gravitational collapse and the physics of black holes , 1971).

Christodoulou was a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1971 to 1972 . From 1972 to 1973 he was Professor of Physics at the University of Athens . He then worked from 1973 to 1974 as a visiting scientist at CERN in Geneva and from 1974 to 1976 at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste .

From 1976 to 1981 he was a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Munich with Jürgen Ehlers , who sent him to Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat in Paris for training in mathematical physics (1977 to 1981), then from 1981 to 1983 he became a visiting member on Courant Institute , where he was a student of Shing-Tung Yau , and then finally began teaching from 1983 to 1987 at Syracuse University , where he was Associate Professor of Physics from 1983 to 1985 and then Professor of Mathematics from 1985 to 1987.

Then Christodoulou was Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute from 1988 to 1992 and at Princeton University from 1992 to 2001. Since 2001 he has been Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the ETH Zurich .

Christodoulou received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 1981 , the Xanthopoulos Award in 1991 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship . In 1999 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his contribution to the mathematical theory of general relativity . He was invited speaker at the ICM 1990 in Kyōto ( The stability of Minkowski spacetime ) and gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress for Mathematical Physics in Prague in 2009 ( The formation of black holes in general relativity ). In 2008 he received the Tomalla Prize . In 2011 he and Richard S. Hamilton received the Shaw Prize in Mathematics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was selected as plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 in Seoul (Hyperbolic PDE and Lorentzian Geometry). In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences . In 2016 he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea . In 2001 he received an honorary doctorate from Brown University .

In an intensive collaboration with Sergiu Klainerman , which lasted from 1984 to 1991, he proved the global stability of the Minkowski space within the framework of general relativity, about which both wrote a book ( The global nonlinear stability of Minkowski space , Princeton Mathematical Series 1993). They also described in detail the asymptotic behavior of disorders of the Minkowski space.

In the 1980s and 1990s he also investigated the development of trapped surfaces (inclusion surfaces , according to Roger Penrose ) in spherical-symmetrical spacetime with scalar fields as matter and showed for this case a form of the cosmic censorship conjecture by Penrose: there can be naked singularities form, but as Christodoulou showed, these are unstable.

In the 2000s, he turned to the general theory of relativity and other nonlinear hyperbolic systems, the formation of shock waves in compressible liquids in three dimensions. He also studied the formation of inclusion surfaces in general relativity without assumptions of symmetry, through the concentration of incoming gravitational waves in the Minkowski space.

Mihalis Dafermos is one of his PhD students .

In addition to Greek, he is also a US citizen .

Fonts

• Violation of cosmic censorship in the gravitational collapse of a dust cloud, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 93, 1984, 171-195
• The problem of a self gravitating scalar field, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 105, 1986, 337-361
• A mathematical theory of gravitational collapse, Comm. Math. Phys., Vol. 109, 1987, pp. 613-647
• with Klainerman: Asymptotic properties of linear field equations in Minkowski space, Comm. Pure and Applied Math., 43, 1990, 137-199
• with Klainerman: The global nonlinear stability of Minkowski space, Princeton University Press 1993
• The formation of black holes and the singularities in spherically symmetric gravitational collapse, Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 44, 1991, 339-373
• The nonlinear nature of gravitation and gravitational wave experiments, Phys. Rev. Lett., 67, 1991, 1486-1489
• Bounded variation solutions of the spherically symmetric Einstein-scalar field equations, Commun. Pure & Appl. Math., Vol. 46, 1993, pp. 1131-1220.
• Example of naked singularity formation in the gravitational collapse of a scalar field, Annals of Mathematics, 140, 1994, 607-653
• The instability of naked singularities in the gravitational collapse of a scalar field, Annals of Mathematics, Volume 149, 1999, pp. 183-217
• The action principle and partial differential equations, Princeton University Press 2000
• The formation of shocks in 3 dimensional fluids, EMS Monographs in Mathematics, 2007
• The Euler equations of compressible fluid flow, Bulletin AMS, 44, 2007, 581-602
• Mathematical problems in general relativity I, Zurich Lectures in Advanced Mathematics, EMS 2008
• The formation of black holes in general relativity, EMS Monographs in Mathematics, 2009
• The shock development problem, EMS Monographs in Mathematics, 2019

Web links

• Curriculum Vitae on the ETH Zurich website. PDF file
• Article about the award of the Bôcher Memorial Prize 1999 . PDF file
• Literature by and about Demetrios Christodoulou in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Shaw Prize Autobiography
2. ↑ Demetrios Christodoulou in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ↑ ETH researcher receives half a million dollars in: Tages-Anzeiger of June 8, 2011
4. ↑ Press release of the Shaw Prize Foundation on the occasion of the 2011 Shaw Prize in Mathematics