Friday, October 24, 2014

Tullio Regge passed away

Tullio Regge (July 11, 1931 in Turin - October 23, 2014 in Orbassano)

Theoretical physicist and mathematician Tullio Regge, aged 83, passed away yesterday. He gave fundamental contributions to scattering theory (the theory of Regge poles is named after him) and to General Relativity among many other fields. His "Regge calculus" -based on a discretization of spacetime- is still widely used in Loop Quantum Gravity.

The relevance of Regge's heritage in modern physics is well shown by the fact that something like half of my papers cite the so-called Regge-Wheeler equation which describes how a Schwarzschild black hole vibrates after a perturbation and how it emits gravitational waves. The Regge-Wheeler equation was found in the late 1950s, even before the very concept of "black hole" (a name coined by Wheeler only in the 1960s) was formulated.

The Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics has dedicated its homepage to this news, more details on Regge's work can be found here.

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