Born in 1939 to George Rayner Ellis, a newspaper editor, and Gwendoline Hilda MacRobert Ellis in Johannesburg, George Francis Rayner Ellis attended the University of Cape Town, where he graduated with honours in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics with distinction. He represented the university in fencing, rowing and flying.

While a student at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD. in applied maths and theoretical physics in 1964, he was on college rowing teams.

At Cambridge, Ellis served as a research fellow from 1965 to 1967, was assistant lecturer in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics until 1970, and was then appointed university lecturer, serving until 1974.

Ellis rapidly established himself within academic circles, becoming a visiting professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago in 1970, a lecturer at the Cargese Summer School in Corsica in 1971 and the Erice Summer School in Sicily in 1972, and a visiting H3 professor at the University of Hamburg, also in 1972.

The following year, Ellis co-wrote The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with Stephen Hawking, debuting at a strategic moment in the development of General Relativity Theory.

In the following year, Ellis returned to South Africa to accept an appointment as Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, a position he held until his retirement in 2005.

George Ellis proposed a model universe that contains a naked singularity as a recycling mechanism, which he claims gives almost as good a description of the real universe as the conventional model.

The Ellis universe is like a cylinder-shaped universe, except that the Earth is located on one side and a naked singularity on the other. There is no cosmic inflation – the galaxies are arranged very unevenly, with a great deal of material crowded round the singularity, and very little near the Earth. The effect of such a distribution of matter is to produce a red shift of light that, at the Earth, has the same characteristics as if the galaxies were receding.

In terms of philosophy of science, Ellis is a Platonist.

Books

• (with Stephen Hawking):
• (with David Dewar): Low Income Housing Policy in South Africa, Urban Problems Research Unit, UCT, 1979.
• (with Ruth Williams): Flat and Curved Space Times, Oxford University Press, 1988, revised 2000.
• Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained, Bowerdean/Marion Boyars, 1993.
• (with A. Lanza and J. Miller): The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology. University Press, Cambridge 1993; paperback, 2005.
• Science Research Policy in South Africa, Royal Society of South Africa, 1994.
• (with Nancey Murphy): On The Moral Nature of the universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics. Fortress Press, 1996.
• (with John Wainwright, Eds.):
• (with Peter Coles): Is The Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• (Ed.): The Far Future Universe, Templeton Foundation Press, 2002.
• Science in Faith and Hope: an interaction, Quaker Books, 2004.

Papers

Ellis has over 500 published articles including 17 in Nature. Notable papers include:

• "Cosmological perturbations and the physical meaning of gauge-invariant variables" (with Marco Bruni, Peter K. S. Dunsby) The Astrophysical Journal, volume 395 (1992)
• " Schwarzschild black hole lensing" (with K. S. Virbhadra) [Phys. Rev. D 62084003, (2000)]
• " arXiv:gr-qc/9812046v5 Cosmological models" (Cargèse Lectures 1998) (with Henk van Elst)
• "The case for an open Universe" in Nature 370, 609—615 (25 August 1994)
• " Physics, complexity and causality" in Nature 435, p.743 (9 June 2005)
• " Gravitational lensing by naked singularities" (with K. S. Virbhadra) [Phys. Rev. D 65, 103004 (2002)]