Kerr Perturbations

I will give a brief history of the development of perturbation theory for Kerr black holes. I will highlight the various "miracles" of the Kerr metric that have been uncovered, and argue that we still don't really understand their origin. I'll also describe some applications of black hole perturbation theory, including the stability of black holes. Finally, I'll introduce some recent applications of the theory, such as quasi-normal modes, the No-Hair Theorem, and the Area Theorem.