Born on the ninth of October, 1873 in Frankfurt, Karl Swarzschild was born into a wealthy Jewish home, providing him a solid base for success, and would jump start his life into his eventual success as a famous astronomer. From an Early age, Swarzschild demonstrated incredible intelligence, from creating his own telescope, to publishing a paper on celestial mechanics of which included a focus on the theory of the orbits of double stars, all of this at only the age of 16. After graduating from the University of Munich with a doctorate, he later ended up teaching as a professor at the University of Gottingen, where he had the opportunity to work with famous mathematicians and even run the school's observatory. Of course his prestige didn't end there, for not much later he ended up becoming the director of the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam in 1909, and was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Science. He even elected to join the German army in World War One and ended up contracting an extremely painful skin disease while fighting on the Russian front, which even that still did not stop him from publishing three more papers on the theory of relativity and quantum theory.
In one of these publications, Swarzschild actually produced the first exact solutions to Einstein's theories of general relativity, specifically his field equations, which is now known as the Swarzschild metric. The coordinate system within also became known as Swarzschild coordinates, of which was based on a spherically symmetric space-time. Continuing on the name labels developed by him, he also developed the radius for any given mass, known as the Swarzschild radius, whee if that mass could be compressed to fit within that radius, no known force could stop it from collapsing into a gravitational singularity, or what is commonly known as a black hole. Granted, at the time the concept of a black hole was unheard of and even Swarzschild said that this solution was physically meaningless, as something like this could never possibly happen nor exist. While he is best known for his general relativity work, Swarzschild also did excellent work in celestial mechanics an and quantum mechanics, as well as improving upon stellar photometry and stellar structure and statistics. He also did a lot of work on observing Halley's comet and spectroscopy.
