David Lovelock

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David Lovelock (* 1938 in Bromley (London) ) is a British mathematician and theoretical physicist.

Lovelock's father built air runways as a civil engineer during World War II. In 1947 the family moved to South Africa (and returned to England in 1959 without David Lovelock). Lovelock studied at the University of Natal with a bachelor's degree in 1959 and received his doctorate in 1961 with Hanno Rund at the same university. In 1962/63 he was a Junior Fellow at the University of Bristol , where he was a lecturer from 1963 to 1969 . In 1969 he became Associate Professor and 1974 Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada (after which he was Adjunct Professor there). From 1974 he was a professor at the University of Arizona , where he retired in 2004.

He deals with differential geometry , the calculus of variations and general relativity .

In 1971 he presented a generalization of Einstein's theory of gravity to higher dimensions (it is also a metric theory and agrees with Einstein's theory in three and four dimensions). He also proved a theorem that showed the uniqueness of Einstein's field equations in four space-time dimensions: the only divergence-free symmetric (0.2) tensor that locally depends on the second derivatives of the metric is the Einstein tensor .

In 1974 he received a D.Sc. at the University of Natal.

In 1967 he married Fiona Armstrong, with whom he has two daughters.

Fonts

  • The uniqueness of the Einstein field equations in a four-dimensional space, Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Volume 33, 1969, pp. 54-70.
  • The Einstein tensor and its generalizations, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Volume 12, 1971, pp. 498-502
  • The four-dimensionality of space and the Einstein tensor, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Volume 13, 1974, pp. 874-876.
  • with Hanno Rund: Tensors, Differential Forms, and Varational Principles, 1975, Dover 1990 (with a new appendix on global geometry)
  • with Hanno Rund: Variational Principles in the General Theory of Relativity, Annual Report DMV, Volume 74, 1972, pp. 1–65, SUB Göttingen

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ David Lovelock in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English) Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used.
  3. ↑ Alberto Navarro, Jose Navarro, Lovelock's theorem revisited , J. Geom. Phys., Vol. 61, 2011, pp. 1950–1956
personal data
SURNAME Lovelock, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Bromley (London)