Stanley Deser

Stanley Deser (1931 to 2023) was an American physicist known for his work on general relativity. Born in Równe, then in Poland, he escaped Europe with his family in 1940 on visas from the diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes and settled in New York. He took his doctorate at Harvard in 1953, spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Niels Bohr Institute, and later became Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University. With Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner he developed the ADM formalism, which recasts Einstein's theory in Hamiltonian form and defines the energy of a gravitating system. He also showed with Bruno Zumino that supergravity is consistent and with Claudio Teitelboim that it has positive energy. He received the 2015 Einstein Medal.