Name: Dr. Richard H. Price
Title: Senior Lecturer
Email: richardhprice001@gmail.com
Phone: (956) 466-0144
Address: MIT Department of Physics
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139


I use math, computer modeling, approximations, and intuition to understand black hole dynamics and other problems.

Area of Physics

Astrophysics Theory, General Relativity

Research Interests

Relativistic astrophysics; black holes; gravitational radiation; applied mathematical methods, technical writing.

Biographical Sketch

Richard Price received a Master’s equivalent in Engineering Physics, from Cornell University, in 1965, and a PhD in theoretical physics, under the guidance of Kip Thorne, from Caltech, in 1971. He was a professor of physics at the University of Utah from 1971 until 2004 when he became a professor of physics in the University of Texas Brownsville in 2004. He was Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Physics from 2017 through 2020, and has been with the MIT Physics Department since 2016.

Awards and Honors

  • 1991 // Fellow of the American Physical Society
  • 2012 // Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science

Selected Publications

  • Richard H. Price, “Nonspherical Perturbations of Relativistic Gravitational Collapse. I. Scalar and Gravitational Perturbations,” Phys. Rev. D 5, 2419 (1972).
  • Stephen R. Lau and Richard H. Price, “Helically Reduced Wave Equations and Binary Neutron Stars,” International Conference on Spectral and Higher Order Methods (ICOSAHOM), eds. M. Bit- tencourt, N. Dumont, J. Hesthaven Rio de Janeiro, June 27-July 1,, 2016, Springer Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering (2017, Springer)
  • “The Future of Spacetime,” a popular book on spacetime physics and physicists, with essays by Stephen Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and Alan Lightman; introduction by Richard Price. W.W.Norton, May 2002