Rogers' summer research project on gravitational collapse

Elyse Rogers, an undergraduate in mathematics, is doing a summer project, supervised by James Grant, on the topic of “Gravitational collapse in General Relativity“, with the following description: ‘The project will investigate simple models of systems undergoing gravitational collapse to form black holes within General Relativity, Einstein’s classical theory of gravity. Specifically, the project will first study the global structure and smoothness properties of the Oppenheimer-Snyder model of collapse. The project will end with an analysis of Dafermos’s work on the Einstein-Maxwell-scalar field equations, with the aim of improving known results on this system. This work will give important information concerning the behaviour of curvature in spacetimes that develop singularities.’