Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916)
Just after Einstein published his paper on field equations of general relativity in 1915, Karl Schwarzschild, then in the Russian front serving as artillery lieutenant in the German army, studied Einstein's paper and soon discovered the first exact solutions of the Einstein's equations. He wrote two papers, one treating the exterior space of a star, and another treating the interior of a star. The former, the paper on the exterior space of a star, is most famous, and his result is known as "Schwarzschild Geometry" which is applicable to the sun, the earth, and many other stars as well as a black hole, with no spin or negligible spin. He sent these two papers to Einstein, and the two were later published in Sizungsberichte of Preussische Akademie. But he died of sickness in May 1916. Einstein, in reply to the first paper sent to him by Schwarzschild, wrote, "I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way" (Eisenstaedt 1989, 213, and quotation comes from doc. 181; also see original documents).
He was a good astrophysicist, and a professor at Goettingen. His son Martin, incidentally, is a friend of John Archibald Wheeler's, one of the leading theorists of general relativity of our day. Schwarzschild Geometry was able to treat black holes, as it turned out, but many people, including Einstein, Eddington, and Wheeler, resisted the idea of a black hole. However, it is Wheeler who invented the word "black hole" (1967) after he was convinced of its possibility. It is truly remarkable that Schwarzschild Geometry suggested or even implied the possibility of a black hole, long before anyone can entertain such an idea. In tribute to this, Schwarzschild's picture is deformed, immitating his geometry.
Reference
Eisenstaedt, J. (1989) "The Early Interpretation of the Schwarzschild Solution", Einstein and the History of General Relativity (ed. by D. Howard and J. Stachel), Birkhaeuser, 1989.
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 8, doc. 176 (Letter to Schwarzschild, 29 Dec. 1915), doc. 181 (Letter to Schwarzschild, 9 Jan. 1916), Princeton University Press, 1998.
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