Matthew William Choptuik (born 1961) is a Canadian theoretical physicist specializing in numerical relativity.
Choptuik graduated from University of British Columbia with a master's degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. advised by William Unruh in 1986.
He showed—under non-generic initial conditions [3]—the possibility of the occurrence of naked singularity in general relativity with scalar matter.
This had previously been the subject of a bet between Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill.
Hawking lost the bet after Choptuik's publication, but renewed it under non-generic initial conditions.