Highest of titles for Kiwi black hole expert Roy Kerr

Tuesday, 10 May 2016

University of Canterbury Emeritus Professor Roy Kerr became the first New Zealander to be awarded the Einstein Medal by the Albert Einstein Society in 2012.

New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr has been awarded the highest academic title available by the University of Canterbury.

Kerr – best known for discovering an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity – has become the only Canterbury Distinguished Professor in the country.

The prestigious title has only been awarded only twice before in the university's 143-year history and recipients are Nobel Prize winners or equivalent.

Kerr's nomination for the title comes on the back of his winning the highly-regarded Crafoord Prize in astronomy, worth more than $1 million.

* Einstein Medal for NZ professor

* Bright sparks and black holes**

University of Canterbury chancellor Dr John Wood said the award would be presented in Sweden later this month.

'We are extremely proud of Professor Kerr's long association with the University of Canterbury and all that he has done to increase our understanding of the universe.'

Wood said the Royal Society of London described Kerr's work as of particular importance to general relativistic astrophysics, and all subsequent detailed work on black holes had depended on it.

'He has made other important contributions to general relativity theory but the discovery of the Kerr black hole was so extraordinary that it is comparable to the discovery of a new elementary particle,' Wood said.

Kerr, now aged 81, retired as Professor of Mathematics at Canterbury in 1993 after 22 years.

University of Canterbury Professor of physics David Wiltshire, said Kerr's solution made realising Albert Einstein's dream possible.

'Everything we know about black holes comes from observing accretion disks around supermassive ones.'

It was for this work that Kerr and Roger Blandford, of Stanford University, would share this year's Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Back in 1963, before advanced computers existed, Kerr achieved what had eluded others for nearly half a century, solving some of the most difficult equations of physics by hand.

He found the exact solution of Einstein's equations describing rotating black holes.

Kerr's discovery sparked a revolution in physics and, at that time, there was no consensus that such objects even existed. The term black hole was not coined until 1967.

Kerr's work was described in physicist Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.

The recent discovery of gravitational waves by researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was made possible by Kerr's solution.

About 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes in a distant galaxy collided to form a black hole rotating at two-thirds of the maximum possible predicted by Kerr, and LIGO caught the signal.

Researchers now used supercomputers to model such collisions, but without Kerr's solution that modelling would be impossible.

The previous Canterbury Distinguished Professors were both Erskine Fellows – the late Sir Clive Granger, recipient of the Nobel Prize for economic sciences, and Robert Grubbs, who received a Nobel Prize in chemistry.