Prof. em. Dr. Demetrios Christodoulou

Demetrios Christodoulou is Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the ETH Zurich since 2001.

Professor Christodoulou was born on October 19, 1951 in Athens, Greece. He studied physics at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in 1971. During the period 1972-1976 he was a research fellow at Caltech, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Athens, and a visiting scientist at CERN in Geneva and at ICTP in Trieste. During the period 1976-1981 he was at the Max Planck Institute in Munich as a Humboldt fellow. During 1981-1983 he was a visiting member at the Courant Institute in New York. In 1983 he went to Syracuse University as an associate professor in mathematics and physics and was promoted to full professor in 1985. In 1988 he returned to the Courant Institute as a full professor. In 1992 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, a position he held until 2001.

Professor Christodoulou received the MacArthur Fellows award (1993) for his work in mathematics and physics,  the Bocher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society (1999) for his contributions to mathematical analysis in the development of general relativity, the Tomalla prize (gravitation, 2008), and the Shaw Prize in Mathematics for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations in Lorentzian geometry and its applications to general relativity. Professor Christodoulou is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2001 and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 2012.

Professor Christodoulou's research is the study of hyperbolic partial differential equations in conjunction with the development of general relativity and fluid mechanics.