Education
University of Chicago.
physicist university professor
University of Chicago.
He is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University. As the creator of Ashtekar variables, he is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. He has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists.
In 1999, Ashtekar and his colleagues were able to calculate the entropy for a black hole, matching a legendary 1974 prediction by Hawking.
Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has described Ashtekar"s approach to quantum gravity as "The most important of all the attempts at "quantizing" general relativity." Abhay Ashtekar grew up in several cities, including Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, India. After completing his undergraduate education in India, Ashtekar enrolled in the graduate program for gravitation at the University of Texas at Austin.
He went on to complete his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch in 1978 and held several appointments at Oxford, Paris, Syracuse before settling at Penn State.
Books A. Magnon and A. Ashtekar, Translation from French of Élie Cartan's work, "Sur les Varietes a Connexion Affine et la Relativite Generale" with a Commentary and Foreword by A. Trautman, Bibliopolis, Naples, 1986, 199 pages.
A. Ashtekar, Asymptotic Quantization. Bibliopolis, Naples, 1987, 107 pages.
A. Ashtekar, (with invited contributions) New Perspectives in Canonical Gravity. Bibliopolis, Naples, 1988, 324 pages.
A. Ashtekar and J. Stachel, Editors.
Conceptual Problems of Quantum Gravity. Proceedings of the 1988 Osgood Hill Conference (Birkhauser, N Y, 1991), 602 pages.
A. Ashtekar, Lectures on Non-perturbative Canonical Gravity, (Notes prepared in collaboration with RS Tate), (World Scientific Singapore, 1991), 334 pages.
A. Ashtekar, R.C. Cohen, D. Howard, J. Renn, S. Sarkar and A. Shimony (Editors), Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics, Festschrift in honor of John Stachel, Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, Volume 234, (Kluwer Academic, 2003).