Stanley Deser

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Stanley Deser (*1931 in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine)) American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. Currently, he is the Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham.

Deser earned his B.A. in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his Master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953 („Relativistic Two Body Interactions“). From 1953 to 1955, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He held a visiting professorship at All Souls College in Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lecturership at Harvard in 1975.

In the context of general relativity, he is best known for his development (with Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner) of the ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing spacetime as space evolving in time, which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass (so-called ADM mass/energy) which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. Another of his research interests is quantum 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 from Stockholm University (1978) and the Chalmers Institute of Technology (2001), and he is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

One of his graduate students was Lee Smolin.

[edit] 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.

[edit] External links

• Deser's homepage at Brandeis

This article incorporates information from the revision as of June 19, 2008 of the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.