Surf Wiki
Save to docs
society/education

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Gary Gibbons

British theoretical physicist

Summary

British theoretical physicist

FieldValue
honorific_suffix
birth_nameGary William Gibbons
imageGaryGibbons.JPG
captionGary Gibbons at Harvard University,
birth_date
birth_placeCoulsdon, London, England
death_date
resting_place_coordinates
{{CoordLATLONGtype:landmarkdisplayinline,title}} --
fields{{Plainlist
workplaces{{Plainlist
educationPurley County Grammar School
alma_materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, PhD)
thesis_titleSome aspects of gravitational radiation and gravitational collapse
thesis_urlhttp://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.599378
thesis_year1973
doctoral_advisor{{Plainlist
*Stephen Hawking<ref name"mathgene"}}
doctoral_studentsChris Hull
known_for{{Plainlist
awards{{Plainlist
* PhD (1973)<ref name"gibbonsphd"
* FRS (1999)<ref name"royal"
signature
website

(death date then birth date) --

  • University of Cambridge
  • Trinity College, Cambridge
  • Max Planck Institute for Physics}}
  • Dennis Sciama
  • Stephen Hawking}}
  • Gibbons–Hawking ansatz
  • Gibbons–Hawking space
  • Gibbons–Hawking effect
  • Gibbons–Hawking–York boundary term}}
  • PhD (1973)
  • FRS (1999)
  • Dirac Medal (ICTP) (2025)}}

Gary William Gibbons (born 1 July 1946) is a British theoretical physicist.

Education

Gibbons was born in Coulsdon, Surrey. He was educated at Purley County Grammar School and the University of Cambridge, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama. When Sciama moved to the University of Oxford, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973.

Career and research

Apart from a stay at the Max Planck Institute in Munich in the 1970s he has remained in Cambridge throughout his career, becoming a full professor in 1997, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 2002.

Having worked on classical general relativity for his PhD thesis, Gibbons focused on the quantum theory of black holes afterwards. Together with Malcolm Perry, he used thermal Green's functions to prove the universality of thermodynamic properties of horizons, including cosmological event horizons.

His work in more recent years includes contributions to research on supergravity, p-branes

Awards and honours

Gibbons was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1999. His nomination reads

In 2025 he was awarded the Dirac Medal (ICTP).

References

References

  1. {{MathGenealogy
  2. Hull, Christopher Michael. (1983). "The structure and stability of the vacua of supergravity". University of Cambridge.
  3. Gibbons, Gary William. (1973). "Some aspects of gravitational radiation and gravitational collapse". [[University of Cambridge]].
  4. "Library and Archive Catalogue: EC/1999/16 Gibbons, Gary William". [[The Royal Society]].
  5. {{Scopus
  6. ''Euclidean Quantum Gravity'', [http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/1301.html World Scientific (Singapore, 1993)] {{Webarchive. link. (19 May 2012 ; Paperback {{ISBN). 981-02-0516-3
  7. [https://www.ictp.it/news/2025/8/2025-ictp-dirac-medal-goes-gravity-explorers Dirac Medal (ICTP) 2025]
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

alumni-of-st-catharine's-college,-cambridge alumni-of-clare-college,-cambridge british-theoretical-physicists english-physicists fellows-of-trinity-college,-cambridge living-people cambridge-mathematicians british-string-theorists 1946-births british-fellows-of-the-royal-society
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Gary Gibbons — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report