Prof. Antonios Tsokaros, gave a lecture titled "The initial value problem of general relativity and applications in astrophysics" at AMSS on10, January 2018. 

Classical general relativity is usually referred as one of the most beautiful physical theories and one reason for this claim is that it admits an elegant geometrically inspired initial value formulation, with deep connections to physical reality. After tracing the main ideas that led to the current view of understanding, he presented the main formulations that led to astrophysically important solutions both in vacuum as well as in the presence of matter in the talk. The numerical implementation of these methods was also presented in the context of the Compact Object CALculator (COCAL) code whose purpose was to solve for any general-relativistic system in equilibrium or quasi-equilibrium. This included rotating stars, binary neutron stars, binary black holes, black hole-toroids and many others. Future prospects were discussed, too. 

Prof. Antonios Tsokaros is from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.