Piotr T. Chruściel

Portrait of Piotr T. Chruściel

The Medal of the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematics and Physics for the year 2024 is awarded to Piotr T. Chruściel, Professor at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna.

Born in 1957, Zabrze, Poland, Piotr Chruściel began his academic journey at Warsaw University, where he completed his Master's degree in 1980. He then earned his PhD in Physics in 1986 from the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, under the guidance of Prof. J. Kijowski. From 1986 to 1996 he worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences, from 1994 to 2010 he was Professor of Mathematics at the Université de Tours and from 2006 to 2010 also Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Since 2010 he has been Professor of Gravitational Physics at the University of Vienna.

Over the years, Chruściel has held various prestigious fellowships worldwide, including positions at renowned institutions such as the Institute of Physics, London, the University of Cambridge, the Australian National University and the Albert Einstein Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. He is the recipient of the Prix Plumey 2003 of the Académie des Sciences de Paris. From 2011 to 2016 he was a member of the Governing Board of the of the ESI.

Piotr T. Chruściel is one of the leading researchers worldwide in the field of General Relativity. Mathematical General Relativity, to which most of Chruściel's contributions belong, is by itself a highly diverse field, involving techniques ranging from differential geometry, topology over ordinary differential equations to partial differential equations of both elliptic and hyperbolic type. Chruściel has made important contribution to a breadth of topics:

  • Classification of stationary black holes: this is a field in which Chruściel has been the leading authority for many years, see his review [1]. His most recent achievement in the field is the paper “On the uniqueness of Schwarzschild - de Sitter spacetime” [2].
  • Characteristic Initial Value Problem: That plays a basic role in various issues in Mathematical and Numerical Relativity. His recent work in that area is [3].
  • Concept of mass in GR: This plays a central role in both GR and differential geometry. The proof of the so-called invariant mass conjecture for asymptotically flat spacetimes (independently of R. Bartnik) in 1988 has been one of Piotr Chruściel's seminal contributions in the field. He continued to make vital contributions to the field, e.g. his recent paper [4].
  • Gluing methods: After the pioneering work of Corvino and Schoen Piotr Chruściel has been a main contributor, see the work [5].
  • Cosmic and topological censorship: Piotr Chruściel has in the 1990's been one of the first people attacking the issue of cosmic censorship using techniques from partial differential equations. To the issue of topological censorship he has also made vital contributions, see the paper [6].
  • Lorentzian geometry: Piotr Chruściel's work [7] has been a seminal contribution to the field of Lorentzian geometry of non-differentiable metrics.
  • Riemannian Geometry: “Boundary Regularity of Conformally Compact Einstein Metrics” [8].
  • Gravitational Wave Interferometry: Spurred by the spectacular success of gravitational wave astronomy Piotr Chruściel has in a recent series of papers studied the theoretical foundations of interferometric GW detectors. He succeeded to put on solid ground previous calculations which were just based on the eikonal approximation to the Maxwell equations, see the paper [9].

Chruściel has published more than 230 papers, of which more than 50 over the past ten years. He is the author of 4 books among them the recent one on “Geometry of black holes” published by Oxford University Press (2020) and a text book on “Elements on General Relativity“ Birkhäuser (2019). He is coauthor of a number of monographs, e.g., “On mapping properties of the general relativistic constraints operator in weighted function spaces, with applications” in Mémoires de la Société Mathématique de France (2003). He also organized and co-organized scientific programs at several prestigious institutions, among them the Mittag Leffler Institute in Stockholm, the Cargése Summer School, the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge and the ESI.

Webpage of Prof. Chruściel: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/piotr.chrusciel/

[1] Piotr T Chruściel, João Lopes Costa, and Markus Heusler. Stationary black holes: uniqueness and beyond. Living Reviews in Relativity, 15:1–73, 2012.
[2] Stefano Borghini, Piotr T Chruściel, and Lorenzo Mazzieri. On the uniqueness of schwarzschild-de sitter spacetime. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.05941, 2019.
[3] Piotr T Chruściel and Tim-Torben Paetz. Characteristic initial data and smoothness of Scri. I. framework and results. In Annales Henri Poincaré, volume 16, pages 2131–2162. Springer, 2015.
[4] Piotr T Chruściel, Gregory J Galloway, Luc Nguyen, and Tim-Torben Paetz. On the mass aspect function and positive energy theorems for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 35(11):115015, 2018.
[5] Piotr T Chruściel and Erwann Delay. Exotic hyperbolic gluings. Journal of Differential Geometry, 108(2):243–293, 2018.
[6] Piotr T Chruściel, Gregory J Galloway, and Didier Solis. Topological censorship for Kaluza–Klein space-times. In Annales Henri Poincaré, volume 10, pages 893–912. Springer, 2009.
[7] Piotr T Chruściel and James DE Grant. On Lorentzian causality with continuous metrics. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 29(14):145001, 2012.
[8] Piotr T Chruściel, Erwann Delay, John M Lee, and Dale N Skinner. Boundary regularity of conformally compact einstein metrics. Journal of Differential Geometry, 69(1):111–136, 2005.
[9] Thomas B Mieling, Piotr T Chruściel, and Stefan Palenta. The electromagnetic field in gravitational wave interferometers. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 38(21):215004, 2021.