James W. York Jr. (born July 3, 1939 in
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the List of North Carolina county seats, seat of Wake County, North Carolina, Wake County in the United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most ...
) is an American
mathematical physicist
Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developmen ...
who contributed to the theory of
general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics ...
. In any physical theory, it is important to understand when solutions to the fundamental
field equation
In theoretical physics and applied mathematics, a field equation is a partial differential equation which determines the dynamics of a physical field, specifically the time evolution and spatial distribution of the field. The solutions to the equat ...
exist, and answering this question has been a theme of York's scientific work, with
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (; born 29 December 1923) is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of General relativity, Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein field equations, ...
, of formulating the
Einstein field equation as a
well-posed system in the sense of the theory of
partial differential equation
In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a Multivariable calculus, multivariable function.
The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be sol ...
s.
York earned his B.Sc. in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1966 from
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universit ...
.
York used
conformal geometry in the initial value problem, and introduced concepts now called the
York curvature and
York time.
York is a recipient of the
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
, where he is a Fellow.
See also
*
Gibbons–Hawking–York boundary term
References
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1939 births
Living people
21st-century American physicists
Mathematical physicists
American relativity theorists
North Carolina State University alumni
Princeton University faculty
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
Cornell University faculty
Fellows of the American Physical Society
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