Robert Wald

He is the son of the mathematician and statistician Abraham Wald. Wald's parents died in a plane crash when he was three years old.[1] He earned his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1968 and his PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1972,[2] under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler. His doctoral dissertation was titled Nonspherical Gravitational Collapse and Black Hole Uniqueness.[3]

Between 1972 and 1974, Robert Wald worked as a research associate in physics at the University of Maryland.[3] He then moved to the University of Chicago, spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the faculty in 1976.[4] He wanted to move to Chicago in order to work with Robert Geroch and other specialists in gravitation.[5]

In 1977, Wald published a popular-science book titled Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes explaining Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, and its implications in cosmology and astrophysics. The book also gives a survey of what was then ongoing research on gravitational collapse and black holes. This book grew out of a series of lectures Wald gave as part of the Compton Lectures at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1976.[6] The Compton Lectures, given every Spring and Fall quarter, are intended to explain notable advances in the physical sciences to members of the general public.[7]

He published the textbook General Relativity in 1984. Aimed at beginning graduate students, it covers spinors, the variational-principle formulation, the initial-value formulation, (exact) gravitational waves, singularities, Penrose diagrams, Hawking radiation, and black-hole thermodynamics.[8]

Wald has taught first-year graduate courses covering a broad range of topics, including classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and electromagnetism. He has also taught courses on general relativity, his specialty, at both introductory and advanced levels. A particularly effective teacher, he received the Graduate Teaching Award from the University of Chicago in 1997.[9]

Wald investigates black holes and their thermodynamics, and gravitational radiation-reaction (or self-force).[4] Due to quantum-mechanical processes, black holes emit particles and therefore have a definite temperature and entropy.[10] Wald has published over 100 research papers on general relativity and quantum field theory in curved spacetime, many of which have been cited by hundreds of subsequent papers.[11] In 1993, he described the Wald entropy of a black hole, which is dependent simply on the area of the event horizon of the black hole.[12]

He organized The Symposium on Black Holes and Relativistic Stars in 1996, in honor of the late Nobel Prize-winning theoretical astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Distinguished speakers of this event included Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Martin Rees. Although the event charged an entrance fee of $100, Wald made sure all University of Chicago students were admitted free of charge.[9] Chandrasekhar founded a research group on general relativity at the University of Chicago, which includes Wald, James Hartle and Robert Geroch.[13] Although Wald and Chandrasekhar never collaborated on any particular research projects, the two developed warm relations.[5]

He became a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1996 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.[3] He received the Einstein Prize from the APS Division of Gravitational Physics in 2017 for "the discovery of the general formula for black hole entropy, and for developing a rigorous formulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime."[4]

Wald delivered a public lecture at the University of Alabama in October 27, 2015, titled "The Formulation of General Relativity," celebrating the centennial of Einstein's theory.[14] Wald is a member of the LIGO group at the University of Chicago, headed by astrophysicist Daniel Holz. The Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015, one century after Einstein predicted their existence.[15]

• Wald, Robert M. (1992) [1977]. Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87029-4.
• Wald, Robert M. (1984). General Relativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87033-2.
• Wald, Robert M. (1994). Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics. Chicago Lectures in Physics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87027-8.
• Wald, Robert M., ed. (1998). Black Holes and Relativistic Stars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87035-9.

• List of contributors to general relativity
• List of books on general relativity
• Bekenstein–Hawking entropy

• Robert M. Wald faculty page at the University of Chicago
• Robert Wald research articles cited by SLAC-SPIRES
• Robert Wald research articles cited by arXiv
• Some properties of Noether charge and a proposal for dynamical black hole entropy, Vivek Iyer and Robert M. Wald, Phys. Rev., D 50 (1994) 846-864 (sample research paper; cited over 250 times)
• Robert Wald at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Recorded Lectures Given by Robert Wald. Perimeter Institute.
• Silver Screen - PSD faculty members discuss Hollywood's portrayal of science and scientists. The University of Chicago Magazine. Summer 2015.
• The Formulation of General Relativity. Robert Wald. Physics Public Talk. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama. October 27, 2015.