Marcel Grossmann

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Marcel Grossmann (born in Budapest on April 9, 1878 - died in Zurich on September 7, 1936) was a mathematician of Jewish ancestry, and a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.

It was Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called elliptic geometry to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Elliptic geometry is a form of geometry in which there are no parallel lines; it was invented in the nineteenth century by the German mathematician George Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866). Since this geometry contains no parallel lines, triangles have more than 180 degrees and are three dimensional. This concept stands in contrast to normal Euclidean geometry, in which parallel lines extend to infinity and never intersect, and in which triangles have 180 degrees, and hyperbolic geometry, another non-Euclidean geometry in which there are infinitely many lines parallel to a given line and triangles have less than 180 degrees. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossman mentored Einstein in the necessary tensor theory.

The community of relativists celebrates Grossmann's contributions to physics by organizing Marcel Grossman meetings every three years.

[edit] References

A. Einstein & M. Grossmann (1914), "Entwurf einer verallgemeinerten Relativitätstheorie und einer Theorie der Gravitation", Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, 62: 225-261.