Robert Geroch

Paul Robert Geroch ( born June 1, 1942 in Akron, Ohio) is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician who is primarily concerned with general theory of relativity (AR).

Geroch studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in 1963 and was founded in 1967 at Princeton University with John Archibald Wheeler PhD ( Singularities in the Spacetime of General Relativity: Their Definition, Existence and Local Characterization ). As a post - graduate student, he was a Fellow of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation thereafter at Birkbeck College, London University (1967 /68) and 1969/70 at Syracuse University ( a center for the study of AR in the U.S.). 1970 to 1971 he was an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and from 1971 at the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, where he became in 1975 professor of mathematics and physics.

In the AR among others, the Geroch energy or mass is named, one of the attempts to define an invariant mass in the AR, and the Geroch group as a symmetry group of stationary axisymmetric vacuum solutions to the AR.

In addition to AR and relativistic hydrodynamics he deals with general problems of mathematical physics. Among his research interests he lists, in particular, partial differential equations in physics, in particular quasi-linear hyperbolic partial differential equations, first order, which describe a large part of classical physics Assets by Geroch, and Feynman in quantum mechanics path integrals for a special class of evolution operators, the also located close to the bounded operators in Hilbert spaces can be defined mathematically exact. From the latter area also be interested in a general category theoretical framework for the application of the measure and integration theory in physics was born.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Some recent work on global properties of spacetimes ).

His doctoral include Gary Horowitz and Abhay Ashtekar.

Writings

• Mathematical Physics, University of Chicago Press 1985
• Asymptotic Structure of Space -time, in TP Esposito, Louis Witten (Editor) Asymptotic Structure of Space -time, Plenum Press 1977
• General Relativity from A to B University of Chicago Press, 1978
• With James B. Hartle Distorted Black Holes, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Volume 23, 1982, p 680
• With L. Lindblom Dissipative Relativistic Fluid Theories of Divergence Type, Physical Review D, Volume 41, 1990, p 1855
• Relativistic Theories of Dissipative fluid, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Volume 36, 1995, p 4226
• Perspectives in computation, University of Chicago Press 2009
• Lecture Geometrical Quantum Mechanics 1974