Demetrios Christodoulou

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Demetrios Christodoulou (b. October 19, 1951) is a Greek-American mathematician-physicist, well known in the field of general relativity 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 from Princeton University under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler. He has taught at Syracuse University, the Courant Institute and Princeton, with stints at Caltech and CERN. He is currently on the faculty of the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

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. He is a recipient of the Bôcher Memorial Prize, the highest award of the American Mathematical Society, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among numerous other honors. In 2007, he published a book on the formation of shock waves in 3-dimensional fluids. In 2008 he was awarded the Tomalla prize in gravitation and cosmology.

[edit] References

  • Christodoulou, Demetrios: & Klainerman, Sergiu (1993). The global nonlinear stability of the Minkowski space. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08777-6. 
  • Christodoulou, Demetrios (2000). The action principle and partial differential equations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-04957-2. 
  • Christodoulou, Demetrios (2007). The formation of shocks in 3-dimensional fluids. Zurich: European Mathematical Society Publishing House. ISBN 978-3-03719-031-9.