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Stanley Deser is an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. Currently, he is the Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Deser earned his B.A. in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his Master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953. From 1953 to 1955, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He held a visiting professorship at All Souls College in Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lecturership at Harvard in 1975.
In the context of general relativity, he is best known for his development of the ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing spacetime as space evolving in time, which allows a recasting Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to define globally quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all. Another of his research interests is quantum gravity.
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