Abhay Ashtekar

Abhay Vasant Ashtekar (born July 5, 1949) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University. As the creator of Ashtekar variables, he is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. He has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. In 1999, Ashtekar and his colleagues were able to calculate the entropy for a black hole, matching a legendary 1974 prediction by Hawking. Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has described Ashtekar's approach to quantum gravity as "The most important of all the attempts at 'quantizing' general relativity."

Biography

Abhay Ashtekar grew up in several cities, including Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, India. After completing his undergraduate education in India, Ashtekar enrolled in the graduate program for gravitation at the University of Texas at Austin. He went on to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch in 1978 and held several appointments at Oxford, Paris, Syracuse before settling at Penn State.