Werner Israel

Werner Israel
Born	(1931-10-04)October 4, 1931 Berlin, Brandenburg, Prussia, Germany
Died	May 18, 2022(2022-05-18) (aged 90) Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Nationality	German, Canadian
Alma mater	University of Victoria
Known for	No hair theorem, internal structures of black holes
Scientific career
Fields	Gravitational physics
Institutions	University of Victoria
Thesis	Basic topics of the relativistic theory of shock waves (1959)
Doctoral advisor	John Lighton Synge
Doctoral students	Eric Poisson
Influences	Stephen Hawking

Werner Israel, OC FRSC FRS (October 4, 1931 – May 18, 2022) was a physicist, author, researcher, and professor at the University of Victoria.

Biography

Born in Berlin, Germany and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, he first received his B.Sc. in 1951 and later his M.Sc. in 1954 from the University of Cape Town. From 1956 to 1958, he worked as a scholar at the Dublin Institute for Avanced Studies. He then went on to receive his Ph.D. in 1960 from Trinity College, Dublin.

In 1990, together with Eric Poisson, Israel pioneered the study of black hole interiors and, following up a suggestion of Roger Penrose, discovered the phenomenon of mass inflation (which should not be confused with inflationary cosmology).

He was a Fellow in the cosmology programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Until his retirement in 1996 he was a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Alberta. In 1996 he was appointed Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria. Together with Stephen Hawking, he co-edited two volumes on gravitational physics.

Honors

• 1972: Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
• 1974-75: Sherman-Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, CALTECH
• 1981: Medal of Achievement in Physics of Canadian Association of Physicists
• 1983: University of Alberta Research Prize in Natural Sciences and Engineering
• 1984: Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize
• 1986: Fellow of the Royal Society, London
• 1986-91: Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
• 1994: Officer of the Order of Canada

Further reading

• Israel, Werner (1998). "The interior structure of black holes". In Robert M. Wald (ed.). Black Holes and Relativistic Stars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 137–154. ISBN 0-226-87034-0.
• Israel, W. & Poisson, E. (1990). "Internal structure of black holes". Phys. Rev. D. 41 (6): 1796–1809. Bibcode:1990PhRvD..41.1796P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.41.1796. PMID 10012548.
• Hawking, S. W.; Israel, W. (1987). Three Hundred Years of Gravitation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-34312-7.
• Hawking, S. W. & Israel, W. (1979). General Relativity : an Einstein Centenary Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22285-0.