Roy Kerr

Happy Birthday Roy Kerr! The physicist and general relativity guru was born in Kurow, New Zealand, in 1934. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1960. Three years later, while working at the University of Texas, Kerr found a set of solutions to Einstein’s general relativity field equations that describes rotating black holes. Physicist Karl Schwarzschild had come up with solutions for stationary black holes in 1916, but Kerr’s solutions more accurately describe the physics of actual black holes in the universe. When researchers famously detected gravitational waves in February 2016, the observations were consistent with the merger of two rotating Kerr black holes. Physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar wrote that his learning about Kerr’s solution was “the most shattering experience” of his scientific life. “This incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.” (Image credit: Melirius, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Date in History: 16 May 1934