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Austrian mathematician
Mayer in 1931
Walther Mayer (11 March 1887 – 10 September 1948) was an Austrian mathematician, born in
Graz ,
Austria-Hungary .
[1] With
Leopold Vietoris he is the namesake of the
Mayer–Vietoris sequence in
topology .
[2] He served as an assistant to
Albert Einstein ,
[1] and was nicknamed "Einstein's calculator".
[3]
Biography
Mayer studied at the
Federal Institute of Technology in
Zürich and the
University of Paris before receiving his doctorate in 1912 from the
University of Vienna ;
[1]
[4] his thesis concerned the
Fredholm integral equation .
[5]
[6] He served in the military between 1914 and 1919, during which he found time to complete a
habilitation on
differential geometry .
[5] Because he was Jewish, he had little opportunity for an academic career in Austria, and left the country; however, in 1926, with help from Einstein, he returned to a position at the
University of Vienna as Privatdozent (lecturer).
[7] He made a name for himself in
topology with the
Mayer–Vietoris sequence ,
[2] and with an axiomatic treatment of
homology predating the
Eilenberg–Steenrod axioms .
[8] He also published a book on
Riemannian geometry in 1930, the second volume of a textbook on differential geometry that had been started by
Adalbert Duschek with a volume on curves and surfaces.
[5]
In 1929, on the recommendation of
Richard von Mises , he became Albert Einstein's assistant with the explicit understanding that he work with him on
distant parallelism , and from 1931 to 1936, he collaborated with
Albert Einstein on the
theory of relativity .
[1] In 1933, after
Hitler's assumption of power, he followed Einstein to the United States and became an associate in mathematics at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey .
[1] He continued working on mathematics at the Institute, and died in Princeton in 1948.
[1]
Selected publications
with Adalbert Duschek: Lehrbuch der Differentialgeometrie. 2 vols., Teubner 1930.
vol. 1
vol. 2
Über abstrakte Topologie. In:
Monatshefte für Mathematik . vol. 36, 1929, pp. 1–42 (Mayer-Vietoris-Sequenzen)
with
T. Y. Thomas : Foundations of the theory of Lie groups. In:
Annals of Mathematics . 36, 1935, 770–822.
Die Differentialgeometrie der Untermannigfaltigkeiten des R n konstanter Krümmung .
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 38 no. 2, 1935: 267–309.
with T. Y. Thomas:
Fields of parallel vectors in non-analytic manifolds in the large .
Compositio Mathematica , vol. 5, 1938: pp. 198-207.
with
Herbert Busemann :
"On the foundations of calculus of variations ." Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 49, no. 2, 1941: 173-198
A new homology theory. In: Annals of Mathematics. vol. 43, 1942, pp. 370–380, 594–605.
The Duality Theory and the Basic Isomorphisms of Group Systems and Nets and Co-Nets of Group Systems. In: Annals of Mathematics. vol. 46, 1945, pp. 1–28
On Products in Topology. In: Annals of Mathematics. vol. 46, 1945, pp. 29–57.
Duality Theorems . In:
Fundamenta Mathematicae 35, 1948, 188–202.
References
^
a
b
c
d
e
f Pais, Abraham (1982),
Subtle is the Lord : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein , Oxford University Press, pp. 492–494,
ISBN
9780191524028 .
^
a
b Krömer, Ralph (2007), "2.1.4 The Work of Walther Mayer on Chain Complexes",
Tool and Object: A History and Philosophy of Category Theory , Science Networks: Historical Studies, vol. 32, Springer, p. 51,
ISBN
9783764375249 .
^ Topper, David (2012),
How Einstein Created Relativity Out of Physics and Astronomy , Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol. 394, Springer, p. 137,
ISBN
9781461447818 .
^
Walther Mayer at the
Mathematics Genealogy Project
^
a
b
c Weibel, Peter (2005),
Beyond Art: A Third Culture: A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary , Springer, p. 260,
ISBN
9783211245620 .
^ The title of his thesis was Anwendung der Fredholmschen Funktionalgleichung auf einige spezielle Randwertaufgaben des logarithmischen Potentials .
^ Havas, Peter (1999), "Einstein, relativity, and gravitation research in Vienna before 1938", in Goenner, Hubert (ed.), The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity , Einstein Studies, vol. 7, Birkhäuser, pp. 161–206,
ISBN
9780817640606 . See in particular
p. 167 .
^
James, I. M. (1999),
History of Topology , Elsevier, p. 120,
ISBN
9780080534077 .
External links
International National Academics People Other