Ivor Robinson (physicist)

Born in Liverpool, October 7, 1923, "into a comfortable Jewish middle-class family",[3] Ivor Robinson read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate, where he was influenced by Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch.

Lloyd Berkner was directing the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies at Dallas and brought Ivor Robinson there in 1963 when it was a "windowless cube on the Southern Methodist University campus".

"[2] He brought Istvan Ozsváth and Wolfgang Rindler to the Dallas area as permanent members of the newly formed group, alongside a host of distinguished visitors and temporary appointments.

He is known for his pioneering work on null electromagnetic fields ("Robinson's theorem"), for his collaboration with Andrzej Trautman on models for spherical gravitational waves, and for the Bel–Robinson tensor.

Of this S. Chandrasekhar (Nobel laureate, 1983) is quoted as saying "In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe" [7] The following year, a second Symposium, had Quasars and High-energy Astronomy as its published proceedings.

In 1974 the Symposium was back in Dallas, but then it travelled: Boston, Munich (twice), Baltimore, Austin (twice), Jerusalem, Chicago, Brighton, Berkeley, Paris, Stanford, and many subsequent venues.