Charles Misner

Charles William Misner (1932-2023) was an American physicist who worked mainly on general relativity and cosmology and was one of the three authors of the textbook Gravitation. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and Princeton, where John Wheeler supervised his doctorate in 1957, then taught at Princeton before moving to the University of Maryland, College Park in 1963 and becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He was among the first to point out the horizon problem, devised the mixmaster universe model, and found the solution known as Misner space. With Richard Arnowitt and Stanley Deser he wrote the ADM formalism, a Hamiltonian formulation of Einstein equations that underlies much of numerical relativity. He supervised twenty-two doctoral students.