Mihalis Dafermos

Thursday, 25 May 2023, 4.15pm - 5.15pm 

ETH Zürich, main building, HG E 3 

Mihalis Dafermos, Princeton University and University of Cambridge

The mathematics of black holes and spacetime singularities

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.