Dr. Abhay Ashtekar is famous world-wide for trying to connect Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. These two theories are conflicting by nature and scientists are divided between the two. Dr. Ashteker is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, and its sub-field, loop quantum cosmology.
Abhay Ashtekar’s childhood was spent in many Indian metros, including Mumbai. He went to the University of Texas at Austin for his graduation in gravitation. His PhD was at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch. He held many positions at Oxford, Paris and Syracuse before settling at Pennsylvania.
In 1992, Penn State University created the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry specifically for him. Ashtekar and his colleagues calculated the entropy for a black hole. This matched a prediction made by Hawking. His approach to quantum gravity has been described as “The most important of all the attempts at ‘quantizing’ general relativity.”
Ashtekar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and one of only 40 Honorary Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences drawn from the international community. He won the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society and Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has held the Krammers Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Sir C. V. Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
Currently he is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.
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