Demetrios Christodoulou
Greek-American mathematician
Demetrios Christodoulou (Greek: Δημήτριος Χριστοδούλου; born 19 October 1951) is a Greek mathematician and physicist, who became well known for his proof, together with Sergiu Klainerman, of the nonlinear stability of the Minkowski spacetime of special relativity in the framework of general relativity. Christodoulou is a 1993 MacArthur Fellow.
Early life
Christodoulou was born in Athens and received his doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1971 under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler. After a temporary position at Caltech, a full professor position at the physics department of the University of Athens shortly followed at the age of 21.
He visited CERN and the Max Planck Institute for Physics. His also was given an indefinite paid leave to Paris to study mathematics and to Courant. He became professor of mathematics, first at Syracuse University, then at the Courant Institute, and at Princeton University, before taking up his last position as professor of mathematics and physics at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He is emeritus professor since January 2017 and an honorary professor of the departments of mathematics and physics at the University of Crete and Brown. He holds dual Greek and U.S. citizenship.
Achievements
In 1993, he published a book coauthored with Klainerman in which their proof of the stability result is laid out in detail.
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