Citation | George Ellis has been a leader in relativity and cosmology for the last 40 years. With Hawking, he showed that general relativity predicted a 'big bang' singularity in our past, and wrote the classic monograph 'The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time'. He pioneered an influential programme to study and classify homogeneous but anisotropic solutions of Einstein's equations. He has formalised the analysis of observables in cosmology. He has also written and lectured extensively on complexity theory and philosophical issues. As a South African, he was a high profile campaigner during the apartheid era, writing extensively on social problems. Subsequently, as President of the Royal Society of South Africa and in other roles, he has been an influential figure in science and education in that country. |