Abraham H. Taub

Abraham Taub

Abraham H. Taub ( Abraham Haskel "Abe" Taub ; born February 1, 1911 in Chicago ; † August 9, 1999 ) was an American theoretical physicist and mathematician.

life and work

Taub studied mathematics at the University of Chicago (Bachelor's degree in 1931) and at Princeton University , among others with Howard P. Robertson , John von Neumann , Oswald Veblen . He received his doctorate from Robertson in 1935 on (mathematical) cosmology. In 1935/36 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study with Veblen, as well as several times later (1940/41, 1947/48, 1962/63). In the 1930s he worked with Veblen and von Neumann on the then current projective relativity theory (a Kaluza-Klein theory ) and the Dirac equation and spinors in cosmological solutions of general relativity . He became a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle . During the Second World War, from 1942 to 1945 he was the house theorist in a research group headed by Walter Bleakney in Princeton, which experimentally investigated shock waves in shock tubes. Although it was a highly non-linear theory, Taub achieved good agreement with the experiments on the shock wave tubes - the results were published in the Reviews of Modern Physics after the war. In 1946 he received the Presidency Certificate of Merite for this work. In 1948 he went to the University of Illinois , where he was involved in a leading position in the construction of the ORDVAC computer, which was delivered to the Ballistics Research Center of the US Army in Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1952. He was also involved in the construction of the successor model Illiac (which remained at the university) and was head of the university's computer laboratory from 1961 to 1964. From 1964 to his retirement in 1978 he was professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and from 1964 to 1968 director of the computer center. Even after his retirement he remained scientifically active until the 1990s.

Taub is best known for his contributions to the general theory of relativity and its cosmological solutions, the theory of shock waves and especially relativistic hydrodynamics, for which he was considered a leading expert. In a work in the Annals of Mathematics from 1951 he used a differential geometric classification theorem by Luigi Bianchi (1897) to classify Ricci flat spatially homogeneous (3 + 1) dimensional space-times in cosmology (one of the solutions found in this way, the deaf -Universe, named after him). He also spoke about this at the ICM in 1950. He also dealt with differential geometry and numerical analysis, where he, like his teacher von Neumann (whose collected works he published from 1961 to 1963), was a pioneer of numerical hydrodynamics on early computers.

In 1941 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1947/48 and 1958 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . He was on the Advisory Committee of the National Bureau of Standards from 1951 to 1960 and was also a temporary advisor to the Argonne National Laboratory , Los Alamos National Laboratory , Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory . In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Consequences of variational principles in general relativity ). In 1972 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He had been married since 1935 and had two daughters and a son.

Fonts

• Relativistic Rankine-Hugoniot equations. In: Physical Review. Vol. 74, 1948, p. 328
• with Bleakney: Interaction of Shock Waves. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Vol. 21, 1949, p. 584
• with Bleakney, Fletcher: The Mach reflection of shock waves at nearly glancing incidence. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Vol. 23, 1951, p. 271
• Determination of flows behind stationary and pseudo-stationary shocks. In: Annals of Mathematics. Vol. 62, 1955, pp. 300-325.
• A general relativistic variational principle for perfect fluids. In: Physical Review. Vol. 94, 1954, p. 1468
• Empty space times admitting a three parameter group of motions. In: Annals of Mathematics. Vol. 53, 1951, pp. 472-490.
• Stability of general relativistic gaseous masses and variational principles. In: Communications in Mathematical Physics. Vol. 15, 1969, DOI: 10.1007 / BF01645677 , pp. 235–254 ( PDF; 1.283 MB )
• Relativistic fluid mechanics. In: Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics . Vol. 10, 1978
• Relativistic hydrodynamics. In: AH Taub (Ed.) Studies in applied mathematics. 1971, p. 235
• with Sidney Fernbach (Ed.): Computers and their role in the physical sciences. Gordon and Breach, 1970

literature

• Frank J. Tipler (Ed.): Essays in General Relativity: A Festschrift for Abraham Taub. Academic Press, 1980, ISBN 0126913803 .
• Bahram Mashhoon: Abraham H. Taub. February 1, 1911 - August 9, 1999. In: General Relativity and Gravitation. Vol. 33, 2001. (Abridged version: In Memoriam: Abraham Haskel Taub . In: SIAM News. September 10, 2001)

Web links

• Literature by and about Abraham H. Taub in the catalog of the German National Library