- Stanley Deser
Stanley Deser (*1931 in
Równe ,Poland (nowRivne ,Ukraine )) Americanphysicist known for his contributions togeneral relativity . Currently, he is the Ancell Professor of Physics atBrandeis University inWaltham .Deser earned his B.A. in 1949 at
Brooklyn College in New York, and his Master's degree 1950 atHarvard , where he also earned his doctorate in 1953 („Relativistic Two Body Interactions“). From 1953 to 1955, he was at theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He held a visiting professorship atAll Souls College inOxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lecturership at Harvard in 1975.In the context of
general relativity , he is best known for his development (withRichard Arnowitt andCharles Misner ) of theADM formalism , roughly speaking a way of describingspacetime asspace evolving intime , which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely theHamiltonian formalism . In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities likeenergy or, equivalently,mass (so-called ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. Another of his research interests isquantum gravity .In 1994, Deser, along with Arnowitt and Misner, received the
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics . He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, received honorary doctorates fromStockholm University (1978) and theChalmers Institute of Technology (2001), and he is a fellow of both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theUnited States National Academy of Sciences .One of his graduate students was
Lee Smolin .References
*James T. Liu, Michael J. Duff, Kellogg S. Stelle, Richard P.Woodward (Editors) „Deserfest: A Celebration of the Life and Works of Stanley Deser“ (Talks at a conference at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor 2004), World Scientific, Singapore, 2006.
External links
* [http://www.physics.brandeis.edu/faculty/dese.htm Deser's homepage at Brandeis]
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