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Peter Szekeres (Hungarian:[ˈsɛkɛrɛʃ]; born 7 August 1940) is a Australian mathematical physicist born to Hungarian parents. He has made significant contributions to general relativity and theoretical cosmology. He is particularly well known for exact solutions of Einstein's field equations with important applications in astrophysics. These include colliding gravitational waves, and inhomogeneous cosmological models. The latter, known as the Szekeres models, can also be applied to the problem of gravitational collapse. The Szekeres cosmologies are the simplest exact models which contain both the standard Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker model and the spherically symmetric Lemaître–Tolman solution in particular limits. They also account for more general aspects of Einstein's theory, and are increasingly used to model nonspherical structures—walls, filaments, nodes and voids—that are typical in the cosmic web.
Szekeres was born in Shanghai, China to mathematician parents George Szekeres and Esther Szekeres. His parents were from Budapest, but fled to escape the threat of Nazi persecution. Szekeres' father George obtained a job in Shanghai as a leather chemist, having worked as analytical chemist for six years in Budapest.[1]
In June 1948, at the age of 7, Szekeres and his parents moved to South Australia, where his father took up a position as lecturer in mathematics at the University of Adelaide.[2] Peter Szekeres also took his own first degree in mathematics at Adelaide, and described the most significant event of his undergraduate years as being a visit in 1960 by Hermann Bondi who gave a public lecture entitled “Why is the sky dark at night?”.[3] Awarded a Commonwealth scholarship later in the year, Szekeres wrote to Bondi asking whether he could do a PhD with him on cosmology. Surprisingly, Bondi replied that nothing much was happening in cosmology, and recommended Szekeres do general relativity with his colleague Felix Pirani. For Szekeres this was a fortunate turn of events as he found Pirani to be a wonderful supervisor, who really enjoyed spending time with his students.
