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Ivor Robinson (physicist)

January 01, 1970

Ivor Robinson (October 7, 1923 – May 27, 2016)[1][2] was a British-American mathematical physicist, born and educated in England, noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity. He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.

From left: Rainer Sachs, Ivor Robinson, Art Komar, John Lighton Synge, in 1962

Biography edit

Born in Liverpool, October 7, 1923, "into a comfortable Jewish middle-class family",[3] Ivor Robinson read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate, where he was influenced by Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch.[2] He took his B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1947. His first academic placements were at University College of Wales, King's College London, University of North Carolina, University of Hamburg, Syracuse University and Cornell University.[2]

Alfred Schild was developing a department strong in relativity at Austin, Texas, when a second Texas center for relativity research was proposed. Lloyd Berkner was directing the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies at Dallas and brought Ivor Robinson there in 1963 when it was a "windowless cube on the Southern Methodist University campus".[4] Robinson was head of the Mathematics and Mathematical Physics division.[5] "Ivor was charged with the formation of a mathematical physics group concentrating on general relativity and cosmology."[2] He brought Istvan Ozsváth and Wolfgang Rindler to the Dallas area as permanent members of the newly formed group, alongside a host of distinguished visitors and temporary appointments. This institution became the University of Texas at Dallas.

According to Rindler, "No one who knew him will forget what a brilliant conversationalist he was, with his sonorous deep voice and ultra-English accent, with his convictions and occasional mischievousness."[2] "Ivor Robinson is a brilliant mathematician who showed us the elegant simplicity of space-time by pointing to its null structure."[4]

Robinson retired in 2000, remaining Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Scientific Contributions edit

Ivor Robinson contributed extensively to modern developments in the theory of relativity. He is known for his pioneering work on null electromagnetic fields, for his collaboration with Andrzej Trautman on models for spherical gravitational waves, and for the Bel–Robinson tensor. Roger Penrose has credited him as an important influence in the development of twistor theory, through his construction of the so-called Robinson congruences.[6]

Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics edit

Astrophysical sciences developed with attention to spectra of celestial sources to ascertain the chemical origin of these sources. The addition of radio astronomy extended the range of these spectra and revealed quasi-stellar sources with peculiar spectra. Maarten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein found extreme red shifts in their studies, which demanded an explanation. Relativistic astrophysics offered its services as a generator of models such as black holes and their environs. Robinson, Schücking, and others organized the first Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics for December, 1963, in Dallas.[4] The Proceedings were published by University of Chicago Press as Quasi-stellar Sources and Gravitational Collapse. "It is now conventional wisdom that quasars are probably powered by rotating black holes, but it was here at Dallas that the black hole concept emerged as a serious astronomical hypothesis."[4] It was also at this Symposium that Roy Kerr presented his two page paper on the mathematics of rotating black holes. Of this S. Chandrasekhar (Nobel laureate, 1983) is quoted as saying "In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe" [7]

The following year, a second Symposium, had Quasars and High-energy Astronomy as its published proceedings. The series continued with Symposia in alternate years. The sixth Symposium, held in New York in 1972, had its proceedings published by the New York Academy of Sciences. The following volumes of the Annals of the Academy are proceedings of the Symposium series: 224, 264, 302, 336, 375, 422, 470, 571, 647, 688, and 759. In 1974 the Symposium was back in Dallas, but then it travelled: Boston, Munich (twice), Baltimore, Austin (twice), Jerusalem, Chicago, Brighton, Berkeley, Paris, Stanford, and many subsequent venues. From the point of view of astrophysics, a rotating black hole corresponds to a Kerr metric. The astronomical picture of a quasar involves an active galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole.

Works edit

  • 1959: (with Hermann Bondi and Felix Pirani) "Gravitational Waves in General Relativity III. Exact Plane Waves", Proceedings of the Royal Society A 251:519-533 doi:10.1098/rspa.1959.0124.
  • 1960: (with Andrzej Trautman) "Spherical Gravitational Waves", Physical Review Letters 4:431.
  • 1961: "Null Electromagnetic Fields", Journal of Mathematical Physics 2:290,1 doi:10.1063/1.1703712
  • 1962: (with Peter G. Bergmann and Engelbert Schücking) "Asymptotic Properties of a System with Nonzero Total Mass", Physical Review 126(3):1227 doi:10.1103/PhysRev.126.1227
  • 1962: (with Andrzej Trautman) "Some Spherical Gravitational Waves in General Relativity", Proceedings of the Royal Society A doi:10.1098/rspa.1962.0036
  • 1963; (with Alfred Schild) "Generalization of a Theorem by Goldberg and Sachs", Journal of Mathematical Physics 4:484 doi:10.1063/1.1703980
  • 1964: (with Andrzej Trautman) "Exact Degenerate Solutions of Einstein's Equations", in Relativistic Theories of Gravitation edited by Leopold Infeld, Pergamon Press
  • 1969: (with J.R. Robinson and J.D. Zund) "Degenerate Gravitational Fields with Twisting Rays", Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics 18(9):881–92
  • 1969: (with Alfred Schild and H. Strauss) "The Generalized Reissner-Nordstrom Solution", International Journal of Theoretical Physics 2(3):243–5 doi:10.1007/BF00670010
  • 1969: (with Joanna R. Robinson) "Vacuum Metrics without Symmetry", International Journal of Theoretical Physics 2(3):231–42 doi:10.1007/BF00670009
  • 1975: "On Vacuum Metrics of Type (3,1)", General Relativity and Gravitation 6(4):423–7 doi:10.1007/BF00761974
  • 1976: (with Jerzy Plebanski) "Left-degenerate Vacuum Metrics", Physical Review Letters 37(9):493 doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.37.493
  • 1977: (with Alberto Garcia and Jerzy Plebanski) "Null Strings and Complex Einstein-Maxwell Fields with Cosmological Constant", General Relativity and Gravitation 8(10):841–54 doi:10.1007/BF00759588
  • 1978: (with Jerzy Plebanski) "Electromagnetic and Gravitational Hertz Potentials", Journal of Mathematical Physics 19(11):2350–8 doi:10.1063/1.523593
  • 1982: "Null Congruences and Plebanski-Schild Spaces", in Spacetime and Geometry: The Alfred Schild Lectures, University of Texas Press
  • 1983: (with Andrzej Trautman) "Conformal Geometry of Flows in N Dimensions", Journal of Mathematical Physics 24:1425
  • 1984: (with Krzysztof Rozga) "Lightlike Contractions on Minkowski Spacetime", Journal of Mathematical Physics 25(3): 499 to 505 doi:10.1063/1.526189
  • 1984: (with Krzysztof Rozga) "On Some Family of Congruences of Null Strings", Journal of Mathematical Physics 25(3): 589 to 96 doi:10.1063/1.526208
  • 1984: (with Krzysztof Rozga) "Congruence of Null Strings in Complex Spacetimes and Some Cauchy-Kovaleski-type Problems", Journal of Mathematical Physics 25(6):1941–6 doi:10.1063/1.526383
  • 1985: (with Istvan Ozsvath and Krzysztof Rozga) "Plane-fronted Gravitational and Electromagnetic Waves in Spaces with Cosmological Constant", Journal of Mathematical Physics 26(7):1755–61 doi:10.1063/1.526887
  • 1985: (with Peter A. Hogan) "The Motion of Charged Test Particles in General Relativity", Foundations of Physics 15(5): 617–27 doi:10.1007/BF01882486
  • 1985: (with Andrzej Trautman) "Integrable Optical Geometry", Letters in Mathematical Physics 10(2–3) doi:10.1007/BF00398155
  • 1993: (with Edward P. Wilson) "The Generalized Taub-NUT Congruence in Minkowski Spaces", General Relativity and Gravitation 25(3)
  • 1993: (with Andrzej Trautman) "The Conformal Geometry of Complex Quadrics and the Fractional-Linear Form of Möbius Transformations", Journal of Mathematical Physics 34(11):5391–5406 doi:10.1063/1.530311
  • 1997: "On the Bel-Robinson Tensor", Classical and Quantum Gravity 14(1A);A331–3
  • 1998: (with Paul MacAlevey) "An Invariant of Type N Spaces", Classical and Quantum Gravity 15(12): 3935,6
  • 2000: (with Bogdan Nita) "An Invariant of Null Spinor Fields", Classical and Quantum Gravity 17(10):2149–52.
  • 2002: (with P. Downes, P. MacAlevey, and B. Nita) "Approximate Solutions of Type (3,1) and (4)" International Journal of Modern Physics A 17(20): 2733,4

References edit

  1. ^ "Robinson, Ivor 1923-". OCLC WorldCat. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Ivor Robinson, Founding Leader of Math, Physics Departments, Dies". UT Dallas News. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
  3. ^ Wolfgang Rindler & Andrzej Trautman, editors, Gravitation and Geometry: a Volume in Honour of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis (1987), p. 9
  4. ^ a b c d Engelbert Schucking (August 1989) The First Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics Physics Today
  5. ^ "SCAS Final Annual Report 1968-1969" (PDF). University of Texas at Dallas, School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  6. ^ Roger Penrose, "On the Origins of Twistor Theory", in Gravitation and Geometry, a Volume in Honour of Ivor Robinson, edited by Wolfgang Rindler and Andrzej Trautman, Bibliopolis (1987).
  7. ^ https://nzmathsoc.org.nz/downloads/profiles/NZMSprofile58_Roy_Kerr.pdf?t=1262766416 [bare URL PDF]

External links edit

January 01, 1970
ivor, robinson, physicist, ivor, robinson, october, 1923, 2016, british, american, mathematical, physicist, born, educated, england, noted, important, contributions, theory, relativity, principal, organizer, texas, symposium, relativistic, astrophysics, from, . Ivor Robinson October 7 1923 May 27 2016 1 2 was a British American mathematical physicist born and educated in England noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics From left Rainer Sachs Ivor Robinson Art Komar John Lighton Synge in 1962 Contents 1 Biography 2 Scientific Contributions 3 Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics 4 Works 5 References 6 External linksBiography editBorn in Liverpool October 7 1923 into a comfortable Jewish middle class family 3 Ivor Robinson read mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge as an undergraduate where he was influenced by Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch 2 He took his B A in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1947 His first academic placements were at University College of Wales King s College London University of North Carolina University of Hamburg Syracuse University and Cornell University 2 Alfred Schild was developing a department strong in relativity at Austin Texas when a second Texas center for relativity research was proposed Lloyd Berkner was directing the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies at Dallas and brought Ivor Robinson there in 1963 when it was a windowless cube on the Southern Methodist University campus 4 Robinson was head of the Mathematics and Mathematical Physics division 5 Ivor was charged with the formation of a mathematical physics group concentrating on general relativity and cosmology 2 He brought Istvan Ozsvath and Wolfgang Rindler to the Dallas area as permanent members of the newly formed group alongside a host of distinguished visitors and temporary appointments This institution became the University of Texas at Dallas According to Rindler No one who knew him will forget what a brilliant conversationalist he was with his sonorous deep voice and ultra English accent with his convictions and occasional mischievousness 2 Ivor Robinson is a brilliant mathematician who showed us the elegant simplicity of space time by pointing to its null structure 4 Robinson retired in 2000 remaining Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas Scientific Contributions editIvor Robinson contributed extensively to modern developments in the theory of relativity He is known for his pioneering work on null electromagnetic fields for his collaboration with Andrzej Trautman on models for spherical gravitational waves and for the Bel Robinson tensor Roger Penrose has credited him as an important influence in the development of twistor theory through his construction of the so called Robinson congruences 6 Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics editAstrophysical sciences developed with attention to spectra of celestial sources to ascertain the chemical origin of these sources The addition of radio astronomy extended the range of these spectra and revealed quasi stellar sources with peculiar spectra Maarten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein found extreme red shifts in their studies which demanded an explanation Relativistic astrophysics offered its services as a generator of models such as black holes and their environs Robinson Schucking and others organized the first Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics for December 1963 in Dallas 4 The Proceedings were published by University of Chicago Press as Quasi stellar Sources and Gravitational Collapse It is now conventional wisdom that quasars are probably powered by rotating black holes but it was here at Dallas that the black hole concept emerged as a serious astronomical hypothesis 4 It was also at this Symposium that Roy Kerr presented his two page paper on the mathematics of rotating black holes Of this S Chandrasekhar Nobel laureate 1983 is quoted as saying In my entire scientific life extending over forty five years the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein s equations of general relativity discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe 7 The following year a second Symposium had Quasars and High energy Astronomy as its published proceedings The series continued with Symposia in alternate years The sixth Symposium held in New York in 1972 had its proceedings published by the New York Academy of Sciences The following volumes of the Annals of the Academy are proceedings of the Symposium series 224 264 302 336 375 422 470 571 647 688 and 759 In 1974 the Symposium was back in Dallas but then it travelled Boston Munich twice Baltimore Austin twice Jerusalem Chicago Brighton Berkeley Paris Stanford and many subsequent venues From the point of view of astrophysics a rotating black hole corresponds to a Kerr metric The astronomical picture of a quasar involves an active galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole Works edit1959 with Hermann Bondi and Felix Pirani Gravitational Waves in General Relativity III Exact Plane Waves Proceedings of the Royal Society A 251 519 533 doi 10 1098 rspa 1959 0124 1960 with Andrzej Trautman Spherical Gravitational Waves Physical Review Letters 4 431 1961 Null Electromagnetic Fields Journal of Mathematical Physics 2 290 1 doi 10 1063 1 1703712 1962 with Peter G Bergmann and Engelbert Schucking Asymptotic Properties of a System with Nonzero Total Mass Physical Review 126 3 1227 doi 10 1103 PhysRev 126 1227 1962 with Andrzej Trautman Some Spherical Gravitational Waves in General Relativity Proceedings of the Royal Society A doi 10 1098 rspa 1962 0036 1963 with Alfred Schild Generalization of a Theorem by Goldberg and Sachs Journal of Mathematical Physics 4 484 doi 10 1063 1 1703980 1964 with Andrzej Trautman Exact Degenerate Solutions of Einstein s Equations in Relativistic Theories of Gravitation edited by Leopold Infeld Pergamon Press 1969 with J R Robinson and J D Zund Degenerate Gravitational Fields with Twisting Rays Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics 18 9 881 92 1969 with Alfred Schild and H Strauss The Generalized Reissner Nordstrom Solution International Journal of Theoretical Physics 2 3 243 5 doi 10 1007 BF00670010 1969 with Joanna R Robinson Vacuum Metrics without Symmetry International Journal of Theoretical Physics 2 3 231 42 doi 10 1007 BF00670009 1975 On Vacuum Metrics of Type 3 1 General Relativity and Gravitation 6 4 423 7 doi 10 1007 BF00761974 1976 with Jerzy Plebanski Left degenerate Vacuum Metrics Physical Review Letters 37 9 493 doi 10 1103 PhysRevLett 37 493 1977 with Alberto Garcia and Jerzy Plebanski Null Strings and Complex Einstein Maxwell Fields with Cosmological Constant General Relativity and Gravitation 8 10 841 54 doi 10 1007 BF00759588 1978 with Jerzy Plebanski Electromagnetic and Gravitational Hertz Potentials Journal of Mathematical Physics 19 11 2350 8 doi 10 1063 1 523593 1982 Null Congruences and Plebanski Schild Spaces in Spacetime and Geometry The Alfred Schild Lectures University of Texas Press 1983 with Andrzej Trautman Conformal Geometry of Flows in N Dimensions Journal of Mathematical Physics 24 1425 1984 with Krzysztof Rozga Lightlike Contractions on Minkowski Spacetime Journal of Mathematical Physics 25 3 499 to 505 doi 10 1063 1 526189 1984 with Krzysztof Rozga On Some Family of Congruences of Null Strings Journal of Mathematical Physics 25 3 589 to 96 doi 10 1063 1 526208 1984 with Krzysztof Rozga Congruence of Null Strings in Complex Spacetimes and Some Cauchy Kovaleski type Problems Journal of Mathematical Physics 25 6 1941 6 doi 10 1063 1 526383 1985 with Istvan Ozsvath and Krzysztof Rozga Plane fronted Gravitational and Electromagnetic Waves in Spaces with Cosmological Constant Journal of Mathematical Physics 26 7 1755 61 doi 10 1063 1 526887 1985 with Peter A Hogan The Motion of Charged Test Particles in General Relativity Foundations of Physics 15 5 617 27 doi 10 1007 BF01882486 1985 with Andrzej Trautman Integrable Optical Geometry Letters in Mathematical Physics 10 2 3 doi 10 1007 BF00398155 1993 with Edward P Wilson The Generalized Taub NUT Congruence in Minkowski Spaces General Relativity and Gravitation 25 3 1993 with Andrzej Trautman The Conformal Geometry of Complex Quadrics and the Fractional Linear Form of Mobius Transformations Journal of Mathematical Physics 34 11 5391 5406 doi 10 1063 1 530311 1997 On the Bel Robinson Tensor Classical and Quantum Gravity 14 1A A331 3 1998 with Paul MacAlevey An Invariant of Type N Spaces Classical and Quantum Gravity 15 12 3935 6 2000 with Bogdan Nita An Invariant of Null Spinor Fields Classical and Quantum Gravity 17 10 2149 52 2002 with P Downes P MacAlevey and B Nita Approximate Solutions of Type 3 1 and 4 International Journal of Modern Physics A 17 20 2733 4References edit Robinson Ivor 1923 OCLC WorldCat Retrieved 25 November 2015 a b c d e Ivor Robinson Founding Leader of Math Physics Departments Dies UT Dallas News Retrieved 22 June 2016 Wolfgang Rindler amp Andrzej Trautman editors Gravitation and Geometry a Volume in Honour of Ivor Robinson Bibliopolis 1987 p 9 a b c d Engelbert Schucking August 1989 The First Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics Physics Today SCAS Final Annual Report 1968 1969 PDF University of Texas at Dallas School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Retrieved 25 November 2015 Roger Penrose On the Origins of Twistor Theory in Gravitation and Geometry a Volume in Honour of Ivor Robinson edited by Wolfgang Rindler and Andrzej Trautman Bibliopolis 1987 https nzmathsoc org nz downloads profiles NZMSprofile58 Roy Kerr pdf t 1262766416 bare URL PDF Wolfgang Rindler and Andrzej Trautman editors 1987 Gravitation and Geometry A Volume in Honour of Ivor Robinson Bibliopolis Edizioni di Filosofia e Scienze Italy ISBN 978 8870881424 External links editIvor Robinson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Christina Sormani C Denson Hill Pawel Nurowski Lydia Bieri David Garfinkle Nicolas Yunes August 2017 A two part feature The Mathematics of Gravitational waves PDF Notices of the American Mathematical Society 64 7 American Mathematical Society 684 707 doi 10 1090 noti1551 ISSN 1088 9477 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Ivor Robinson physicist amp oldid 1221629125, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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