On the Nonlinear Stability of Slowly Rotating Kerr Black Holes

Roy Kerr’s 1963 invention of a two-parameter family of explicit, stationary, rotating asymptotically flat solutions of Einstein’s field equations in a vacuum ranks as one of the most consequential explicit mathematical solutions in all science, comparable in importance to Newton’s explicit solution of the two-body problem. The breakthrough led to the first observational discovery of black holes and the formulation of deep physical and mathematical problems. Among those problems is the stability conjecture, which states that a perturbed Kerr black hole will settle back down to a stable state.

In this lecture, mathematician Sergiu Klainerman will discuss his recent work resolving the Kerr stability conjecture for slowly rotating black holes.