Departmental Colloquium

Einstein and his contemporaries were famously skeptical about the physical existence of black holes, driven by an aversion to the spacetime singularities predicted in their interior. Penrose’s 1965 singularity theorem, together with compelling astronomical observations, revolutionized this view, establishing black holes as part of physical reality and earning him the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Yet fundamental questions remain open, particularly regarding the nature of singularities inside a black hole. In this talk, we will discuss recent results that rely on modern advances in hyperbolic PDEs that go beyond the classical geometric methods of Penrose’s era.