Thibault Damour

Thibault Damour (; born 7 February 1951) is a French physicist.
He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) since 1989. 
An expert in general relativity, he has long taught this theory at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm). He contributed greatly to the understanding of gravitational waves from compact binary systems, and with Alessandra Buonanno, he invented the "effective one-body" approach to solving the orbital trajectories of binary black holes. He is also a specialist in string theory.