Alessandro Carlotto: Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki
We are delighted to announce that the Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki has recently honoured the work of Professor Alessandro Carlotto with an exposé entitled "Anti-gravité à la Carlotto et Schoen".
In his lecture, Piotr Chruściel (one of the world's top experts on mathematical aspects of general relativity) has given a broad-spectrum presentation of the milestone 70-pages paper "Localizing solutions of the Einstein constraint equations" by Alessandro Carlotto and his former PhD advisor Richard Schoen, which appeared on the September issue of the leading journal Inventiones Mathematicae.
Roughly speaking, the authors proposed a new method of producing solutions to the external page Einstein equations (namely: the equations that describe the propagation of gravitational fields) that exhibit highly surprising properties: for example, their approach allows to construct N-body solutions where any massive body does not perceive at all the presence of the other ones on finite but arbitrarily long time scales, in striking contrast with the Newtonian gravity scenario (where interactions happen instantaneously). Such solutions have rapidly become known in the literature as exotic and their investigation, as well as their construction in cosmological settings, has been a main research theme in the last few years.
The construction by Carlotto and Schoen ensures that full gravitational shielding, which is prohibited in classical physics, is indeed possible in general relativity.
About the Bourbaki Seminar
The external page Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki (in French) is a very prestigious series of public lectures, established in Paris in 1948, that are devoted to an exposition of some of the latest, most outstanding results in contemporary mathematics. Every year only sixteen works, in the whole corpus of the mathematical literature, are selected and presented in the framework of the Bourbaki Seminar.
The Séminaire is named after Nicolas Bourbaki, a pseudonym for a group of leading French mathematicians whose founding members were Henri Cartan, Calude Chevalley, Jean Coulomb, Jean Delsarte, Jean Diedonné, Charles Ehresmann, René de Possel, Szolem Mandelborjt and André Weil. Later members include, among others, Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre and Alexander Grothendieck.
Almost seventy years after its establishment, the Séminaire Bourbaki still serves as a barometer of mathematical trends and a recognition of the highest calibre.
