Short Biography of Basilis Xanthopoulos

Basilis (as he used to write his first name) Xanthopoulos was a greek theoretical physicist, who made several fundamental contributions in General Relativity and Gravitational Physics until his premature death (along with Stefanos Pnevmatikos) on November 27, 1990.

He was born in Drama, Greece, and studied Mathematics at the University of Thessaloniki. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Chicago (USA) where, in 1978, he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Robert Geroch. He taught and worked as a researcher at the Universities of Montana, Syracuse, and Harvard in the US, as well as at the Max Planck Institute, in Germany. He returned to Greece as Chief Assistant at the University of Thessaloniki (1979-1982) before joining the Department of Physics of the University of Crete as an Assistant Professor (1982-1983), Associate Professor (1983-1987), and Professor (1987-1990). He was the Chairman of the Department (1987-1990) at the time of his death.

Basilis was one of the closest collaborators of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize in Physics 1983). They published together many important papers on black holes, colliding gravitational waves, space time perturbations, and other topics in General Relativity.

Links to all publications of Basilis available in ADS can be seen here.