Demetrios Christodoulou: farewell lecture
On 16 May, Professor Demetrios Christodoulou gave his farewell lecture entitled: "A personal experience through mathematics and physics". He has been professor at the Department since 2001.
Laudatio by Mete Soner, Head of Department:
Good evening everyone,
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you Professor Demetrios Christodoulou.
Demetrios’s fascinating journey into mathematics and physics started in Athens. On 19 October 1951 he was born to a Greek family with ties to Cyprus, Egypt and Asia Minor. From very early on he was very much interested in sciences. His remarkable talents led him to an admission to the graduate school at Princeton at the age of 17. In two years he wrote his first paper "Reversible and irreversible transformations in black hole physics”. In 1971 he obtained his PhD in Physics and held several positions at CalTech, Athens, CERN and Trieste. These years were followed by a five year stay at the Max-Plank Institute in Munich as a Humbolt Research Fellow. Then he moved to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, where he met and collaborated with Shing-Tung Yau.
According to Demetrios, the years in Munich and New York were essential for his ground-breaking work on stability of the Minkowski space. In 1991, he received the Mac-Arthur Fellowship, the so-called "Genius Price" and in 1999 the Bocher Memorial Price of the American Mathematical Society for this influential work.
Before joining ETH in 2001, Demetrios was at Courant Institute from 1988 to 1992 and at Princeton from 1992 to 2001.
Demetrios received many prices and awards. He has given lectures at the International Congress of Mathematics in 1990 and 2014 and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US and the Academia Europa. In 2011 he received the Shaw Price. For his great achievements, the Hellenic Republic honoured Professor Demetrios Christodoulou the "Order of the Phoenix” in July 2000.