James W. York

James Wesley York, Jr. ( born July 3, 1939 in Raleigh, North Carolina) is an American theoretical physicist who deals with theory of gravitation.

York studied at the North Carolina State University where he was a bachelor's degree in 1962 and 1966 made ​​his doctorate. After teaching in 1968 at Princeton University in 1973 he went back to the North Carolina State University as a professor of physics. He was Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and 2001 Inter- Institutional Distinguished Professor of Physics in 1989. After his retirement in 2002, he went to Cornell University as an honorary professor of astronomy and physics..

He examined, inter alia, the initial value problem in general relativity theory, for which he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 2003 with Yvonne Choquet - Bruhat. He stressed the importance of the first conformal geometry in the initial value problem of general relativity and introduced concepts such as the " York - curvature " and "York time ". He is currently working on an extension to initial value - boundary value problems for the gravitational field equations with the aim of numerical implementations.

In 2003 he was awarded the Marcel Grossmann Award.