Georgios Moschidis

Georgios Moschidis obtained his PhD in 2018 from Princeton University, where he was advised by Mihalis Dafermos. Since then he has been a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Moschidis’s work is focussed on mathematical problems arising in classical general relativity, the theory of gravity first formulated by Einstein in 1915. In this context, he is particularly concerned with instability phenomena. Moschidis gave the first rigorous account of the celebrated Friedman “ergo-sphere” instability, whose existence was conjectured in the early 1970’s. In a remarkable series of papers over the last few years, he has also addressed the problem of instability for anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, the ground state solution to the Einstein equations with a negative cosmological constant. In contrast to the Friedman instability, the much sought-after instability in this context (which has been observed in numerical simulations) is non-linear in origin. Moschidis’s achievements include a rigorous proof of the instability of AdS in the case of the Einstein-Vlasov system with spherical symmetry. His groundbreaking proof contains ideas that transform the understanding of large-data phenomena in solutions of the Einstein equations.

Georgios Moschidis has been appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for a term of two years beginning 1 July 2021.