[3] Papapetrou was then the first who recognized and jubilantly welcomed Kerr's breakthrough announced at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, Dallas, December 1963.
From 1925, Papapetrou studied mechanical and electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, graduating in 1930.
In 1935, he earned his PhD there, with a dissertation on Investigations on the dendrite growth of crystals,[8] and subsequently returned to the Technical University in Athens as an assistant in electrical engineering.
As a result, in 1946, he moved to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at the invitation of Erwin Schrödinger, with whom he worked on unified field theories.
In 1975, he became Director of the IHP Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, and in 1977 he retired, remaining scientifically active.