Dr. Nikolaos Athanasiou talks at the Queen Mary University about the impossible gravitas of black holes
On Tuesday, February 8th, Dr. Nikolaos Athanasiou, Assistant Professor at ACT, was invited to give a talk at the Geometry, Analysis & Gravitation seminar at Queen Mary University, London.
His talk under the title “A scale-critical trapped surface formation criterion for the Einstein-Maxwell system” discussed the black holes, a phenomenon that continues to capture the popular imagination, from the mathematical physics perspective. First encountered in the Schwarzschild solution, discovered a few months after the presentation of the Field Equations of General Relativity at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the black hole as a mathematical phenomenon accompanies and prominently features within the history of General Relativity since its inception. In this talk, we will lay out a brief history of the question of dynamical black hole formation in General Relativity and discuss a result, in collaboration with Xinliang An, on a scale-critical trapped surface formation criterion for the Einstein-Maxwell system.
Nikos Athanasiou holds a Bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge (King’s College) and a Doctorate in Mathematics (D.Phil) from the University of Oxford (Keble College). Prior to joining ACT he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Imperial College London. He has been invited to give talks to many universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and many others. He has also been passionate about mathematical olympiads/competitions since he was a teenager and has published a book on mathematical problem-solving.
Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
