Paul Ramond wins the Ehlers Prize

Awarded every 3 years by the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, the Jürgen Ehlers Prize rewards a particularly original thesis in the field of general relativity.

The award was given to Paul Ramond "for an extremely well written and innovative thesis on the first law of binary mechanics in general relativity. The thesis is a tour de force that provides a powerful and mathematically elegant extension of the first law to include quadrupole interactions, thus giving higher order information about the behavior of relativistic binaries."

The thesis of Paul Ramond, a former doctoral student at the Applied Mathematics Unit of ENSTA Paris, had already been distinguished by the scientific publisher Springer to benefit from an edition in book format in the "Springer Theses" collection. This was already a recognition of the scientific excellence of the work and its impact in the field of research concerned.

Paul Ramond's thesis supervisors were Alexandre Le Tiec, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, and Jérôme Pérez, teacher-researcher at the Applied Mathematics Unit of the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA Paris), Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau.

Paul Ramond donnant un cours sur les ondes gravitationnelles à ENSTA Paris
Paul Ramond donnant un cours sur les ondes gravitationnelles à ENSTA Paris.

The Ehlers Prize was established in 2008 by the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation in memory of Professor Jürgen Ehlers (1929-2008), a prominent relativist and former president of the Society. Professor Ehlers made fundamental contributions to the foundations of general relativity, to many of its mathematical aspects and to cosmology. He was the founding director of the Albert Einstein Institute of the Max Planck Society of Germany and was awarded the Max Planck Medal, the highest honor given by the German Physical Society.