Howard P. Robertson

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Howard P. Robertson , full name Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson (born January 27, 1903 in Hoquiam , Washington , † August 26, 1961 in Pasadena , California ), was an American mathematician and physicist .

Life

Robertson studied mathematics and physics at the University of Washington in Seattle (master's degree in 1923) and received his doctorate in 1925 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with Harry Bateman ( On the Dynamical Space-Time Which Contains a Conformal Euclidean 3-Space ). He then worked as a post-doc at the University of Göttingen , the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (with Arnold Sommerfeld ) and Princeton University . From 1947 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics at Caltech.

During the Second World War he was chief liaison officer to the scientists in the British Secret Service, where he worked in particular with Reginald Victor Jones . After the war he continued to work for the secret service, the then newly founded CIA and headed the Weapons System Evaluation Group at the US Department of Defense. In 1953 he was chairman of a commission at the CIA ( Robertson Panel ) to evaluate reports on UFOs . Among other things, he recommended a public education program.

research

Robertson treated the two-body problem in general relativity in 1938 , but without gravitational radiation. He is known for the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric (often also referred to as the Robertson-Walker metric for short) in cosmology. Robertson and Walker gave it late 1930s independently of the work of their predecessors (Friedman published in 1922 and 1924, but was largely ignored and died in 1925, Lemaitre discovered the solution in 1927 again, his work has been published by Eddington in England) a strict mathematical basis.

In 1929 (Physical Review Vol. 34, p. 163) Robertson developed a mathematical version of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation (as did Erwin Schrödinger at the same time ), the Robertson-Schrödinger relation.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Philosophical Society (1940) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1957).

See also

literature

  • In memoriam. In: Engineering & Science. October 1961, p. 23 ( PDF )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Howard P. Robertson in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ^ Annals of Mathematics . Vol. 39, p. 101
  3. ^ Robertson: Kinematics and world structure. In: Astrophysical Journal . Vol. 82, 1935, pp. 248-301; Vol. 83, 1936, pp. 187-201, pp 257-271
  4. ↑ Walker: On Milne's theory of world-structure. In: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Vol. 42, 1937, pp. 90-127.
  5. ↑ Physical Review . Vol. 34, p. 163
personal data
SURNAME Robertson, Howard P.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Robertson, Howard Percy; Robertson, Bob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoquiam
DATE OF DEATH August 26, 1961
Place of death Pasadena