George Rainich

George Yuri Rainich (* as Georg or Juri Rabinowitsch March 25, 1886 in Odessa ; † October 10, 1968 in Ann Arbor ) was a Russian-American mathematician and theoretical physicist.

He published as Rabinowitsch before his time in the USA and is quoted as JL Rabinowitsch and G. Rabinowitsch during this time.

Life

Rainich studied mathematics at the University of Odessa from 1904 to 1908, in Göttingen (1905/06) and Munich (1906/07), graduated from Odessa in 1908 and received his master's degree in mathematics from the University of Kazan in 1913 . He then taught at the University of Kazan as a private lecturer from 1913 to 1917 and as a professor at the University of Odessa from 1917 to 1922. Due to the unrest in Russia in 1922 he emigrated with his wife to the USA via Istanbul. From 1923 to 1926 he was a Johnston Scholar at Johns Hopkins University and changed his name from Rabinowitsch to Rainich. He then became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan , where he became an associate professor in 1929, professor in 1934 and retired in 1956. For a long time he was chairman of the doctoral committee. After retiring, he was at Brown University in 1957 on the editorial staff of Mathematical Reviews and he was visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame for several years . After his wife's death in 1963, he went back to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and organized a seminar on relativity for both physicists and mathematicians.

plant

From 1924 Rainich dealt with generalized field theories of gravity in extension of the general relativity theory and electrodynamics in curved spacetime. That's why he was in contact with Albert Einstein . Other areas of work were differential geometry, vector analysis, mathematical physics and number theory. In 1950 he published a book on the mathematics of relativity and worked on its new edition before his death. Today he is best known for investigations into the inclusion of electrodynamics in general relativity. The Rainich conditions from his work of 1925 give necessary and sufficient conditions for a vacuum solution of general relativity also to contain a non-vanishing electromagnetic field. He lectured on this in 1928 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna.

In 1929 he published under his old name Rabinowitsch a simplification of the proof of Hilbert's zero theorem , later known as the Rabinowitsch trick.

In number theory he found new results for the polynomials that were already known to Leonhard Euler and which generate prime numbers for certain prime numbers p (prime for and ). Rabinowitsch found that the polynomial has prime values if and only if the class number of the imaginary-quadratic number field is equal . ${\displaystyle g(p)=n^{2}+n+p}$ ${\displaystyle n=0,1,...,p-2}$ ${\displaystyle p=2,3,5,11,17,41}$ ${\displaystyle n=0,1,...,p-2}$ ${\displaystyle Q({\sqrt {(1-4p)}}}$ ${\displaystyle 1}$

In 1928 he was a lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna (On a Spacetime posessing the symmetry properties of radiation), under the name Rainich, and also in 1912 at the Cambridge (under the name Rabinowitsch). From 1933 to 1936 he was on the council of the American Mathematical Society.

Private

In 1917 he married Sophie Kramkowsky. He had a daughter with her. In 1930 he also brought his mother from Russia, who died in 1953. In 1964, in memory of both of them, he established a scholarship for foreign students and those of African American origin at the University of Michigan. A brother Dr. Michael Rabinowitsch lived in Moscow.

He spoke many modern European languages, at least to be able to read them.

Fonts

• Mathematics of Relativity. Lecture Notes, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1950, Dover 2014, Archives
• Electrodynamics in the General Theory of Relativity, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 27, 1925, pp. 106-136, online

Web links

• Rainich Papers, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
• George Rainich in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• Rainich, Faculty History Project, University of Michigan , with obituary by KB Leisenring

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rainich, Electrodynamics in the general theory of relativity, Transactions American Mathematical Society, Volume 27, 1925, pp. 106-136
2. ^ Letters and other documents from Einstein and Rainich, Albert Einstein Archive, Hebrew University, search function
3. ^ Hans Stephani, Dietrich Kramer, Malcolm MacCallum, Cornelis Hoenselaers, Eduard Herlt, Eduard :. Exact Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, chapter 5.4
4. ↑ CG Torre, The spacetime geometry of a null electromagnetic field, 2014, Arxiv
5. ↑ JL Rabinowitsch, on Hilbert's zero set, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 201, 1929, p. 520, SUB Uni Göttingen . The essay is only one page long.
6. ↑ W. Dale Brownawell, Rabinovich trick Springer Encyclopedia of Mathematics
7. ↑ H. Möller, generalization of a theorem by Rabinowitsch about imaginary-quadratic number fields, Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, Volume 285, 1976, pp. 100-113, SUB Uni Göttingen
8. ↑ Georg Rabinowitsch, Uniqueness of the decomposition into prime number factors in quadratic number fields, J. Reine Angew. Math., Volume 142, 1913, pp. 153-164, SUB Uni Göttingen
9. ↑ There he presented his work on quadratic number fields, see Rabinowitsch, J. Reine Angew. Math., Vol. 142, 1913, p. 153