When he ran the Boston Marathon at age 18, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported he "is 5 feet 1 inch tall, weighs 95 pounds and looks about 13."[3][4] He wore his birth certificate pinned to his jersey to prove his age.[3] Isenberg says he has "completed 143 marathons, including 30 Boston Marathons."[5]
At Princeton University he graduated with an A.B. in physics in 1973. He was a graduate student under Charles Misner at the University of Maryland, and he earned Ph.D. in physics in 1979, with his dissertation, Construction of Spacetimes from Initial Data.[6]
In Australia in 2017, Isenberg was standing in the ocean when a wave knocked him over, injuring his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. He has been recovering with therapy at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia.[5] In 2019 at the Princeton alumni parade, he "led his class down the route in a wheelchair".[7]
Isenberg lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife, economist Pauline Kennedy.[5]
Career
Isenberg is one of the pioneers in the study of the constraint equations in classical general relativity.[8] His many important contributions include the completion of the solution theory of the constraint equations on closed manifolds with constant mean curvature,[9] and with his collaborators, the first nontrivial results on the non-constant mean curvature case.[10]
From 1973 to 1979, Isenberg held positions in the physics department at the University of Maryland. Between 1979 and 1982 he held a postdoctoral fellow positions in the applied mathematics department of the University of Waterloo and the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley.[2]
Isenberg joined the mathematics department faculty at the University of Oregon in 1982 and in 2021 became a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Oregon.[11]
Recognition
Isenberg was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2000, cite "For his pioneering work on global issues in general relativity and for his contributions to the field."[12]
He was named to the 2021 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to mathematical general relativity and geometry flows".[13]
^Isenberg, James; Moncrief, Vincent (1994), Flato, M.; Kerner, R.; Lichnerowicz, A. (eds.), "Some Results on non Constant Mean Curvature Solutions of the Einstein Constraint Equations", Physics on Manifolds: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in honour of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Paris, June 3–5, 1992, Mathematical Physics Studies, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 295–302, doi:10.1007/978-94-011-1938-2_21, ISBN978-94-011-1938-2