Brandon Carter is one of the fathers of modern black hole theory. In my talk I will present some of his key contributions to the topic.
As a beginning researcher I had the chance to benefit from Brandon's wise advice for my early work, from my 1977 thesis on cosmological singularities that he directed to his suggestion to numerically visualize black holes in 1978. Then we could fully collaborate from 1982 to 1986 in a series of pioneering papers on the modelisation of tidal disruption of stars by big black holes.
Although it looks simple, the Schwarzschild metric describes a complicated spacetime that is endowed with two asymptotic regions and two singularities. The situation is even more complicated for charged or spinning black holes. Grasping the complexity of these metrics can fortunately be achieved thanks to the celebrated Carter-Penrose diagrams. However, such diagrams do not allow to guess the...
