Willem Jacob van Stockum

Willem Jacob van Stockum (20 November 1910 – 10 June 1944) was a Dutch mathematician who made an important contribution to the early development of general relativity.

After the family (less the father) relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a gold medal.

In 1938, he published a paper which contains one of the first exact solutions in general relativity which modeled the gravitational field produced by a configuration of rotating matter, the van Stockum dust, which remains an important example noted for its unusual simplicity.

In this paper, van Stockum was apparently the first to notice the possibility of closed timelike curves, one of the strangest and most disconcerting phenomena in general relativity.

Anxious to join the fight against Hitler, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, eventually earning his pilots wings in July 1942.