The BTZ black hole, named after Máximo Bañados, Claudio Teitelboim, and Jorge Zanelli, is a black hole solution for (2+1)-dimensional topological gravity with a negative cosmological constant. The BTZ black hole, named after Máximo Bañados, Claudio Teitelboim, and Jorge Zanelli, is a black hole solution for (2+1)-dimensional topological gravity with a negative cosmological constant. In 1992 Bañados, Teitelboim and Zanelli discovered the BTZ black hole solution (Bañados, Teitelboim & Zanelli 1992). This came as a surprise, because when the cosmological constant is zero, a vacuum solution of (2+1)-dimensional gravity is necessarily flat (the Weyl tensor vanishes in three dimensions, while the Ricci tensor vanishes due to the Einstein field equations, so the full Riemann tensor vanishes), and it can be shown that no black hole solutions with event horizons exist. But thanks to the negative cosmological constant in the BTZ black hole, it is able to have remarkably similar properties to the 3+1 dimensional Schwarzschild and Kerr black hole solutions, which model real-world black holes.