Frans Pretorius
physicist
Frans Pretorius (born 31 July 1973) is a South African and Canadian physicist, specializing in computer simulations in astrophysics and numerical solutions of Einstein's field equations. He is professor of physics at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Gravity Initiative.
Biography
Pretorius sat for a B.Sc. in computer engineering in 1996 and an M.Sc. in physics in 1999 for his thesis, entitled Topics in Black Hole Physics under Werner Israel, at the University of Victoria. He defended his Ph.D. in 2002 under Matthew Choptuik at the University of British Columbia. For his doctoral dissertation on numerical simulation of gravitational collapse, Pretorius received the 2003 Nicholas Metropolis Award of the American Physical Society. From 2002 to 2005 he was a Richard Chace Tolman Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He then became an assistant professor in 2005 at the University of Alberta and in 2007 at Princeton University.
Research
His research deals with numerical simulations in general relativity theory, especially gravitational collapse, collision, and mergers of black holes and consequent emission of gravitational waves.
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