About Willem Jacob van Stockum
Willem Jacob van Stockum (20 November 1910 – 10 June 1944) was a Dutch mathematician who made an important contribution to the early development of general relativity. == Biography == Van Stockum was born in Hattem in the Netherlands. His father was a mechanically talented officer in the Dutch Navy. After the family (less the father) relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a gold medal. He went on to earn an M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1937. In the mid-1930s, van Stockum became an early enthusiast of the then new theory of gravitation, general relativity. In 1938, he published a paper which contains one of the first exact solutions in general relativity which modeled the gravitational field produced by a configuration of rotating matter, the van Stockum dust, which remains an important example noted for its unusual simplicity. In this paper, van Stockum was apparently the first to notice the possibility of closed timelike curves, one of the strangest and most disconcerting phenomena in general relativity. Van Stockum left for the United States in hope of studying under Albert Einstein, eventually in the spring of 1939 gaining a temporary position under Professor Oswald Veblen at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The outbreak of the Second World War occurred while he was teaching at the University of Maryland.
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