Gary Gibbons

Gary William Gibbons ( born July 1, 1946 in Coulsdon, Surrey ) is a British theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Gibbons has studied at Cambridge University, where he was under Dennis Sciama research student in 1969. As Sciama for Oxford University was, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, he received his PhD in 1973 ( Some Aspects of Gravitational Radiation and Gravitational Collapse ). In addition to his research at the Max - Planck -Institut 1976/77, he remained throughout his career at Cambridge and in 1997 full professor, 1999 Member of the Royal Society and in 2002 a " Fellow of Trinity College ." 1986 / / 87 he was at the Ecole Normale Superieure ( and again in 1999 ) and the Observatory in Meudon, 1980, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1992 Kramers Professor at the University of Utrecht, 2000 Yukawa professor at Kyoto University 1990 at IHES and 2003 visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While Gibbons initially worked on the classical theory of general relativity for his doctoral thesis, he focused later on the quantum theory of black holes. Together with Malcolm Perry, he used thermal Green's functions in order to show the generality of thermodynamic properties of horizons, cosmological event horizons included. He developed the Euclidean approach to Quantengravität with Stephen Hawking, which allows to derive the thermodynamics of black holes using the method of a functional integral.

His recent work includes contributions to the supergravity p- branes and M- theory, which are mainly motivated by the string theory. Gibbons remains interested in geometric problems of any kind, find the application in physics.