In the same week that the scientific community celebrated news that University of Texas at Austin alumnus Michael Young was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on circadian rhythms, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves, work that also was heavily influenced by UT Austin scientists and alumni.
April 2018 Update: Dr. Kip Thorne, one of the 2017 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, will deliver the inaugural Cécile DeWitt-Morette Memorial Lecture on April 25 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hogg Memorial Auditorium. The event is open to the public, but RSVPs are requested to reserve your space.
Credit: David Steadman and Jenna Luecke
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To: Marc Airhart, David Steadman, Jenna Luecke - THANK YOU, for recognizing my parents [Bryce & Cecile] in the contributions to Kip Thorne/LIGO Nobel Prize :-))) When 12, my sisters & I lived right next door to Wheeler & wife at Batelle Rencontres, which M helped organize, in Seattle, for that summer [1967?]. When i was in high school, M&D let Larry Smarr live at their house while they were gone for summer; i was home, tho. Larry very kindly came & spoke to my Austin High School physics class about black holes. Kip was one of D's best friends. Thx, again, & to College of Nat'l Sciences !!! - from Jan DeWitt
You left off UT Professor Richard Matzner who for many years has been involved in a program to "provide controllable convergent algorithms to compute gravitational waveforms which arise from Black Hole encounters, and which are relevant to astrophysical events and may be used to predict signals which for detection by future ground-, and space-, based detectors."
Kip Thorne also was PhD adviser for current UT Austin faculty member Bill Press, a professor of computer science and computational biologist now. Together they published papers about sources of gravitational waves and research directions for the field.