Tevian Dray received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. His dissertation, entitled The Asymptotic Structure of a Family of Einstein-Maxwell Solutions, analyzed the structure of a family of spacetimes, some of which describe accelerating black holes, and showed that they contain gravitational radiation, thus demonstrating the existence of exact radiating solutions to the Einstein field equations. His dissertation advisor was Rainer K. Sachs, although much of this work was done in collaboration with Abhay Ashtekar. The dissertation committee consisted of Professors Sachs, Jerrold E. Marsden, and Joseph Silk.
The original dissertation was written in troff, printed on a graphic plotting device, then photocopied. Although no electronic copy was kept, a printout of the source code survived. (Ten years later, Berkeley was asked if they had kept a backup tape. They laughed.) With the generous assistance of Mark Irons, the dissertation was retyped from this source code in 2007, slightly edited (correcting major errors only), translated into groff, then converted to PDF. The original hand-drawn figures were scanned, then converted to PNG, and are available separately above.