Roy Kerr

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Roy Patrick Kerr (born 1934) is a New Zealand born mathematician who is best known for discovering the famous Kerr vacuum, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity, which models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, or even a rotating black hole.

Kerr's mathematical talent was first recognized while he was still a high school student at St Andrew's College, Christchurch. He went on to earn his M.Sc. in Mathematics at the Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand, the precursor to the University of Canterbury, in 1953. Kerr then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960. His dissertation concerned the difficult problem of the equations of motion in general relativity.

After a stint as a postdoctoral student at the Syracuse University in Syracuse, he spent some time working for the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on a bizarre (and soon aborted) anti-gravity project. In 1962, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where in 1963, he discovered his famous exact vacuum solution. By his own admission, Kerr himself did not realize for some time the importance of this discovery (as the title of his paper suggests). In 1965, with Alfred Schild, he introduced the Kerr-Schild spacetimes. During his time in Texas, Kerr supervised four Ph.D. students of his own, despite being (as he puts it), a "party animal".

In 1971, Kerr returned to the University of Canterbury, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Kerr retired from his position as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Canterbury in 1993 after having been there for twenty-two years, including ten years as the head of the Mathematics department.

[edit] References

Roy Kerr. Mathematics Genealogy Project. University of North Dakota. Retrieved on August 7, 2005.
Burinskii, A,; & Kerr, R. P.. Nonstationary Kerr Congruences. arXiv eprint server. Retrieved on August 7, 2005.
Kerr, R. P.; & Schild, A. (1965). "Some algebraically degenerate solutions of Einstein's gravitational field equations". Proc. Symp. Appl. Math. 17: 119.
Kerr, R. P. (1963). "Gravitational field of a spinning mass as an example of algebraically special metrics". Phys. Rev. Lett. 11: 237.