Achille Papapetrou

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Achille Papapetrou (also Achilles Nikolau Papapetrou, Greek χιλλέας Παπαπέτρου Achilleas Papapetrou , born February 2, 1907 in Serres , Greece ; † August 12, 1997 in Paris ) was a Greco-French theoretical physicist who was particularly concerned with general relativity (ART) .

Life

Papapetrou was the son of a school teacher. During the First World War , the family was temporarily driven from Serres in northern Greece by the Turks but returned. Papapetrou studied electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic in Athens from 1925 and graduated with a diploma in 1930. While still a student, he also became an assistant in the mathematics faculty, which he also remained part-time when he began to work as an engineer. He published work on solid state physics and in 1934 went to the Technical University of Stuttgart with Paul Ewald on a scholarship . There he met Helmut Hönl ; from their collaboration developed his interest in the theory of relativity . In 1935 he received his doctorate at the TH Stuttgart ( investigation of the dendritic growth of crystals ) and was then assistant in electrical engineering in Athens. 1940 to 1946 he was a physics professor at the Polytechnic in Athens, where he held seminars on the theory of relativity and he worked in relative isolation during the German occupation. In 1946 he went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin with Erwin Schrödinger , who worked on standardized field theories and published them with the Papapetrou. From 1948 he was at the University of Manchester , where he was a colleague of Léon Rosenfeld and worked on the equations of motion of the ART and the equations of motion of particles with spin in the ART. From 1952 to 1961 he was a scientist at the Research Institute for Mathematics of the German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and from 1957 professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin , where Georg Dautcourt and Hans-Jürgen Treder were his students. From 1962 he was at the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) in Paris, where he was a visiting scientist in 1960/61 and where there was already a strong group of relativity theorists with André Lichnerowicz and Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat . At the same time he was research director of the CNRS . In 1975 he became director of the laboratory for theoretical physics at the IHP and in 1977 he (formally) retired, but remained scientifically active. Among other things, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton (1964/65), Vienna (1970/71), Boston University (1972)

He later took French citizenship.

Papapetrou-Dixon equations, Majumdar-Papapetrou solutions of Einstein's field equations and Weyl-Lewis-Papapetrou coordinates are named after him. He dealt with exact solutions of Einstein's field equations and searched for a long time for a solution for rotating masses, but only Roy Kerr found it. Papapetrou was the first to welcome Kerr's breakthrough at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in 1963.

Since 1971 he has been a member of the organizing committees of the international conferences on ART (General Relativity and Gravitation, GRG).

Rodolfo Gambini is one of his doctoral students .

Fonts

  • Special Theory of Relativity , 1955, 5th edition, Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1975

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Spelling for the German dissertation in 1935. As a Frenchman, he adopted the French name form
  2. ↑ Kip Thorne Black holes and time warps , 1995, see Mctutor biography of Roy Kerr . Papapetrous student G. Dautcourt also reports on this in Race for the Kerr field , General Relativity and Gravitation, Volume 41, 2009, p. 1437
personal data
SURNAME Papapetrou, Achille
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Papapetrou, Achilles Nikolau (full name); Papapetrou, Achilleas (full name); Παπαπέτρου, Αχιλλέας (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greco-French theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Serres , Greece
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1997
Place of death Paris