Karl Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild (German: [kaːl ˈʃvaːtsʃɪlt] (listen); 9 October 1873 – 11 May 1916) was a German physicist and astronomer. Schwarzschild provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole. Schwarzschild accomplished this while serving in the German army during World War I. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Karl Schwarzschild has received more than 584,150 page views. His biography is available in 51 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 49 in 2019). Karl Schwarzschild is the 145th most popular physicist (down from 119th in 2019), the 542nd most popular biography from Germany (down from 432nd in 2019) and the 25th most popular German Physicist.

Karl Schwarzschild is most famous for his solution to the Schwarzschild metric, which is a solution to Einstein's equations of general relativity. This solution describes the gravitational field outside a spherical mass.