John Lighton Synge

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John Lighton Synge (born March 23, 1897 in Dublin ; † March 30, 1995 ibid) was an Irish-Canadian mathematician and theoretical physicist who mainly dealt with general relativity , differential geometry, geometric mechanics and optics .

life and work

Synge attended St. Andrews College in Dublin and studied from 1915 at Trinity College there . In 1919 he graduated with a master's degree in mathematics and physics, while receiving the college gold medal. From 1920 to 1925 he was an assistant professor in Toronto . In 1925 he returned to Trinity College as a professor of physics ("Natural Philosophy"), where he also became a Fellow. In 1930 he was back in Toronto as a professor of applied mathematics. In 1939 he was at Princeton University , in 1941 visiting professor at Brown University , in 1943 dean of the mathematics faculty at Ohio State University and in 1946, after two years as a ballistician with the US Air Force , in the same position at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh . In 1948 he became a colleague of Erwin Schrödinger as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, founded in 1940 . In 1972 he retired there.

In 1943 he became a member of the Royal Society in London and the London Mathematical Society . He was also a member of the Royal Society of Canada (he was the first recipient of their Henry Marshall Tory Medal) and the Royal Irish Academy , of which he was president from 1961 to 1964. A biannual award from Trinity College Dublin is named after him.

Synge's list of publications includes over 200 papers in a wide variety of areas of theoretical and mathematical physics. Through his teaching (and not least some very well-known textbooks) he had a great influence on the development of general relativity, when it was still stagnating in the 1950s. In particular, he gave the representation of the theory a geometric embedding. He also wrote textbooks on mechanics and geometrical optics, in which he worked out William Rowan Hamilton's uniform geometrical approach to both areas.

In 1924 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto ( Normals and curvature of a curve in a Riemannian Manifold ), also in Zurich in 1932 ( The equilibrium of a tooth with a general conical root ) and in Oslo in 1936 ( On the connectivity of spaces of positive curvature , as well as Limitations of the behavior of an expanding universe ), and in 1962 he gave a lecture in Stockholm ( The hamiltonian method applied to water waves ).

He was married to Eleanor Mabel Allen, with whom he had two daughters. His daughter, Cathleen Synge Morawetz, was also a well-known mathematician; his uncle John Millington Synge was a well-known playwright.

The John L. Synge Award is presented in his honor .

Works

  • Synge: Talking about relativity. North Holland 1970.
  • Synge, Alfred Schild : Tensor Calculus. University of Toronto Press, 1949, 1964, 1969.
  • Synge, Byron Griffith: Principles of Mechanics. McGraw Hill 1942, 3rd edition, 1959.
  • Synge: Classical Dynamics. In: Siegfried Flügge (Ed.): Handbook of Physics - Principles of classical dynamics and field theory. 1960.
  • Synge: Relativity - the General Theory. North Holland 1960.
  • Synge: General Relativity. In: de Witt (Ed.): Relativity, Dynamics and Topology. Les Houches Lectures 1963.
  • Synge: Relativity - the Special Theory. North Holland, 1965, 2nd edition 1972.
  • Synge: The hypercircle in mathematical physics - a method for the solution of boundary value problems. Cambridge 1957.
  • Synge: Geometrical optics - an introduction to Hamilton's method. Cambridge 1937.
  • Synge: Science: Sense and Nonsense , London: Cape, 1951
  • Synge: Kandelman's Crimea; A Realistic Fantasy , London: Cape, 1957
  • Synge: Relativistic Hydrodynamics , Proc. London Math. Soc., Vol. 43, 1937, pp. 376-416

literature

  • Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh (Editor): General Relativity - papers in honor of JL Synge. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972 (with list of publications).
  • Petros Florides, obituary in Irish Mathematical Society Bulletin No. 37, 1996, pp. 3-6, and article in Mark McCartney, Andrew Whitaker (Ed.): Physicists of Ireland - passion and precision , IOP Publishing, 2003

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Synge, John Lighton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish-Canadian physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Dublin
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1995
Place of death Dublin