Clifford Martin Will
Clifford Martin Will (born 1946) is a Canadian-born theoretical physicist who specializes in general relativity. He grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and earned a B.Sc. from McMaster University in 1968. He completed his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1971, studying under Kip Thorne.
Will has taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, and he joined Washington University in St. Louis in 1981, where he worked until 2012. Since 2012, he has been at the University of Florida.
His main research area is post-Newtonian expansions—techniques for approximating Einstein’s field equations to test gravity in complex systems like binary stars. This work helped support the indirect evidence for gravitational waves found from observations of a binary pulsar by Hulse and Taylor. Will wrote a leading book reviewing experimental tests of general relativity, and he also wrote a popular book on the same subject that The New York Times listed among the 200 best books of 1986.
Awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996–1997), and he served as editor-in-chief of Classical and Quantum Gravity from 2009 to 2018. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. In 2019, he received the Albert Einstein Medal for his important contributions to general relativity, particularly the post-Newtonian approach and its experimental tests. His work is widely cited in the field.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 04:28 (CET).