James Burkett Hartle: a Biographical Memoir
Abstract
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As a result, he was known as the father of quantum cosmology. He is best known for two seminal papers with Stephen Hawking that introduced two quantum states of fundamental importance: the "Hartle-Hawking vacuum" for matter fields outside a black hole, and the "no-boundary wave function of the universe" for cosmology. Jim (as everyone called him) was a warm and caring person who was genuinely concerned with the success of his students, postdocs, and colleagues. He was generous with his time and helped to foster a culture of a welcoming family among gravitational physicists.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.14288,
title = {James Burkett Hartle: a Biographical Memoir},
author = {Gary T. Horowitz and Kip S. Thorne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.14288},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
This memoir is published in the Biographical Memoir Series of the US National Academy of Sciences. 8 pages