London Heilbronn Colloquium 2023: Mihalis Dafermos

01 Jun 2023, by ablahatherell in Sponsored events

Friday 16 June 2023 at 15:00

Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, UK


The London Heilbronn Colloquia are a series of triannunal lectures by distinguished mathematicians and theoretical physicists at the forefront of current research. They are aimed at a general mathematical audience and informal interaction with the speaker.


Organiser: Fred Alford (Imperial College London)


The Mathematics of Black Holes and Spacetime Singularities

Mihalis Dafermos, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Cambridge & Department of Mathematics, Princeton, USA


General relativity makes spectacular predictions about our world, predictions which have captured the popular imagination more than any other part of physics: gravitational waves, black holes, spacetime singularities. For the mathematician, however, perhaps the most spectacular thing about these predictions is not their exoticness, but, on the contrary, the fact that they all correspond to well-defined mathematical concepts: Indeed, it was precisely through mathematics that these predictions of general relativity were first discovered—originally to much controversy and objection! — and the qualitative mathematical analysis of the Einstein equations remains one of the most powerful ways to understand the great conceptual questions of the theory. This talk will describe some past contributions of mathematics to general relativity and some of the big open conjectures which mathematics hopes to answer in the future.



Information on past and future colloquia is available here

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