Race for the Kerr field

TL;DR

This paper discusses the historical development and challenges in deriving the Kerr metric, a solution describing rotating black holes, highlighting past efforts and the significance of Kerr's discovery.

Contribution

It provides a historical analysis of the attempts before Kerr's solution and insights into why earlier efforts failed to find the exact rotating black hole metric.

Findings

Historical context of Kerr metric discovery

Analysis of pre-Kerr attempts and their limitations

Insights into the significance of Kerr's solution

Abstract

Roy P. Kerr has discovered his celebrated metric 45 years ago, yet the problem to find a generalization of the Schwarzschild metric for a rotating mass was faced much earlier. Lense and Thirring, Bach, Andress, Akeley, Lewis, van Stockum and others have tried to solve it or to find an approximative solution at least. In particular Achilles Papapetrou, from 1952 to 1961 in Berlin, was interested in an exact solution. He directed the author in the late autumn of 1959 to work on the problem. Why did these pre-Kerr attempts fail? Comments based on personal reminiscences and old notes.