Marcel Grossmann

Marcel Grossmann
File:Marcel Grossmann.png
Born	(1878-04-09)April 9, 1878 Budapest
Died	Zurich
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor	Wilhelm Fiedler
Notable students	Karl Merz

Marcel Grossmann (Hungarian: Grossmann Marcell, April 9, 1878 – September 7, 1936) was a mathematician and a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein. Grossmann was a member of an old Swiss family from Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.

Career

In 1900 Grossmann graduated from Zurich Polytechnikum and became an assistant to the geometer Wilhelm Fiedler. He continued to do research on non-Euclidean geometry and taught in high schools for the next seven years. In 1902, he earned his doctorate from the University of Zurich with the thesis On the Metrical Properties of Collinear Structures. In 1907, he was appointed full professor of descriptive geometry at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. It was Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation", which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.

As a professor of geometry, Grossmann organized summer courses for high school teachers. In 1910, he became one of the founders of the Swiss Mathematical Society.

Grossmann died of multiple sclerosis in 1936. The community of relativists celebrates Grossmann's contributions to physics by organizing Marcel Grossmann meetings every three years.

References

• English translate
• Graf-Grossmann, Claudia, with T. Sauer, Marcel Grossmann: Aus Liebe zur Mathematik, Römerhof-Verlag, Zürich, 2015, ISBN 978-3-905894-32-5
• T. Sauer, ''Marcel Grossmann's contribution to the general theory of relativity'', in: ''Proceedings of the 13th Marcel Grossmann meeting on Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Astrophysics and Relativistic Field Theories'', July 2012. Edited by Robert T. Jantzen, Kjell Rosquist, Remo Ruffini. World Scientific, 2015, pp. 456–503.(http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4068)

External links

• Marcel Grossmann meetings
• .
• Marcel Grossmann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project