Exact Solutions and Scalar Fields in Gravity - Instituto Avanzado de ...

Prof. Dietrich Kramer: Brief Biography
Dietrich Kramer was born in Weida, in a small and nice village in
Thuringen, Germany. He studied Physics at the Friedrich Schiller University
of Jena and got his Diploma in 1962, at the age of 22. In 1966
he finished his Ph.D. at the same University, working in problems of
bispinors in curved spaces.
Since those years curved space–times and General Relativity have
been his passions. In 1969 he published together with Gernot Neugabauer
a paper in Annalen der Physik (Leipzig), where the definition
of the Ernst potentials is given. They discovered and studied the potentials
independently at the same time as Fred Ernst did. These potentials
are maybe one of the most important results of the last times in General
Relativity
The Annalen der Physik Journal was not very well known at the time
of the cold war, for this reason only few people were able to read the
work of Kramer and Neugebauer. In this work, they proposed a method
to generate exact solutions of the axially symmetric exterior fields of
the Einstein field equations, by using subgroups and subspaces of the
whole isometry group of these space–times. Many other people all over
the world developed later this method further. A lot of the well–known
exact solutions of the Einstein field equations can be generated using
this elegant, powerful and simple method.
Dietrich Kramer got his Habilitation in 1970 with the thesis: Invariantztransformationen
strenger Vakumlösungen in der allgemeine Relativitätstheorie.
In 1980, together with Hans Stephani, Malcolm Mac-
Callum and Eduard Held, he wrote the historical monograph: Exact
Solutions to the Einstein Field Equations, one of the most important
books of General Relativity, indispensable textbook for people working
on Differential Geometry, curved spaces or partial differential equations
connected with the Einstein equations.
In 1981, together with Gernot Neugabauer, Dietrich Kramer was
awarded with the price of the General Relativity Foundation. Since
1992 he is Professor for Theoretical Physics in Gravitational Theory at
Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Among other positions, Dietrich
Kramer has been Dean of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the
same University.
Prof. Kramer has delivered invited talks at many of the most important
Universities and international conferences of the world. He
maintains good scientific relationships with other groups of relativity,
in particular with groups in Madrid and in Mexico at Cinvestav.
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