Rado Lecture -- The Einstein equations and a Nobel prize winning theorem

Title:  The Einstein equations and a Nobel prize winning theorem

Speaker:  Richard Schoen (University of California - Irvine)

Abstract:  We will introduce the Einstein equations and explain how they have led to two recent Nobel prizes in physics, the 2017 prize for detection of gravitational waves and the 2020 prize for the prediction and detection of black holes. We will describe the singularity theorem of Roger Penrose which is a rigorous result which gives geometric conditions on initial data for the Einstein equations which guarantee that the spacetime which evolves must be singular in a precise sense.