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Abhay Ashtekar (born July 5, 1949) is an Indian physicist. He is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University. As the creator of Ashtekar variables, he is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. He has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. These may be found on the Semi-Popular Articles page of his website below.

Ashtekar completed his undergraduate education in India. He then studied under Robert Geroch in the University of Chicago, receiving his Ph.D. in 1974 (thesis: "Asymptotic Structure of the Gravitational Field at Spatial Infinity").

Books

1. A. Magnon and A. Ashtekar, Translation from French of Elie Cartan's work, "Sur les Varietes a Connexion Affine et la Relativite Generale" with a Commentary and Foreword by A. Trautman. Bibliopolis, Naples, 1986, 199 pages.

2. A. Ashtekar, Asymptotic Quantization. Bibliopolis, Naples, 1987, 107 pages.

3. A. Ashtekar, (with invited contributions) New Perspectives in Canonical Gravity.Bibliopolis, Naples, 1988, 324 pages.

4. A. Ashtekar and J. Stachel, Editors; Conceptual Problems of Quantum Gravity. Proceedings of the 1988 Osgood Hill Conference (Birkhauser, N. Y., 1991), 602 pages.

5. A. Ashtekar, Lectures on Non-perturbative Canonical Gravity, (Notes prepared in collaboration with R.S. Tate), (World Scientific Singapore, 1991), 334 pages.

6. A. Ashtekar, R.C. Cohen, D. Howard, J. Renn, S. Sarkar and A. Shimony (Editors), Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics, Festschrift in honor of John Stachel, Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, Volume 234, (Kluwer Academic, 2003).