Contact: ettore.minguzzi[AT]unifi.itLocation: online
Last December Roger Penrose was awarded (one half of) the 2020 Nobel prize for “the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”, that is, for his 1965 gravitational collapse singularity theorem.
Unfortunately, this important news came during the Covid-19 emergency which prevented this event to be celebrated as deserved. Jointly with his 1963 study of the conformal boundary, Penrose’s 1965 theorem marked the beginning of causality methods in mathematical relativity giving impulse to mathematical relativity itself.
This meeting is meant to honor Roger Penrose’s accomplishments in mathematical relativity, particularly his use of global differential geometric methods in general relativity. Given the extent of Penrose’s contributions, the idea is to focus just on the following themes more closely related to the Nobel prize motivation and to Penrose’s mathematical methods:
1) Causality theory and singularity theorems (including abstract frameworks, low differentiability studies, weakened energy conditions)
2) Causal/conformal boundaries
3) Cosmic censorship (mostly from a differential geometric viewpoint)
Our goal is to gather researchers who use in their work Penrose’s differential geometric methods or who have an interest in them and some perspectives to share. We wish that this meeting could summarize the present status of mathematical relativity research in the above areas.