Roy Patrick Kerr (born 1934),New Zealand mathematician. Kerr obtained his doctorate in 1959 from the University of Cambridge. His career was spent working on general relativity and the mathematical physics of black holes and gravity. In the 1960s,he worked at the University of Texas at Austin,USA. From 1971 to his retirement in 1993,he worked at the the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His Kerr metric (or Kerr vacuum,1963) is a solution to Einstein's equations as applied to a rotating black hole. His honours include the Rutherford Medal (1993),the Albert Einstein Medal (2013),and the Crafoord Prize (2106). Photographed in 2009,in Oxford,UK |