Jürgen Ehlers, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Jürgen Ehlers

German physicist

Date of Birth: 29-Dec-1929

Place of Birth: Hamburg, Germany

Date of Death: 20-May-2008

Profession: physicist, astrophysicist, university teacher

Nationality: Germany

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

Jürgen Ehlers (German: ['j??g?? 'e?l?s]; 29 December 1929 – 20 May 2008) was a German physicist who contributed to the understanding of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
From graduate and postgraduate work in Pascual Jordan's relativity research group at Hamburg University, he held various posts as a lecturer and, later, as a professor before joining the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich as a director.
In 1995, he became the founding director of the newly created Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Ehlers' research focused on the foundations of general relativity as well as on the theory's applications to astrophysics.
He formulated a suitable classification of exact solutions to Einstein's field equations and proved the Ehlers–Geren–Sachs theorem that justifies the application of simple, general-relativistic model universes to modern cosmology.
He created a spacetime-oriented description of gravitational lensing and clarified the relationship between models formulated within the framework of general relativity and those of Newtonian gravity.
In addition, Ehlers had a keen interest in both the history and philosophy of physics and was an ardent populariser of science.