The International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation organized an online event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Large Scale Structure of Space-time by Hawking and Ellis.
There was a talk by George Ellis with the following title and abstract:
Hawking and Ellis @50 – built on the work of many, still going strong
H&E was the result of my collaboration with Stephen Hawking from 1965 to 1973, encouraged by Dennis Sciama, and based strongly on the work of Roger Penrose. Indeed it builds on the work of successive generations of pioneers in both mathematics and physics, and presents as an integrated whole the global understanding of spacetime structure as it was in 1973. The underlying issue is the tension between geometrical and analytic approaches to studying properties of spacetimes, and the book centrally takes a geometrical approach. It is still cited by many today.
We also had a talk by Abhay Ashtekar with the title and abstract:
The Hawking & Ellis Monograph and the Renaissance of General Relativity
Quotes on the back-cover of the 1973 edition of the monograph hailed it as a “masterpiece written by sure hands” and “certain to rank as an outstanding classic”. These descriptions were remarkably prescient. I will briefly discuss the profound influence that this monograph has had in shaping the understanding of strong gravity by new generations of researchers. The ensuing advances over the past five decades have made general relativity increasingly prominent in physics, astronomy and mathematics.
The Zoom session was recorded and posted on YouTube.
