Luther P. Eisenhart
Luther Pfahler Eisenhart (born January 13, 1876 in York (Pennsylvania) , † October 28, 1965 in Princeton ) was an American mathematician .
Live and act
Eisenhart studied mathematics at Gettysburg College (Bachelor's degree in 1896) and at Johns Hopkins University , where he received his doctorate in 1900 with a thesis on Differential Geometry ( Infinitesimal deformation of Surfaces ), which was strongly rooted in the tradition of Gaston Darboux , whose textbooks on differential geometry Eisenhart had studied. From 1900 he was at Princeton University , where he became a professor in 1909 and retired in 1945. Even after his retirement he remained mathematically active. From 1925 to 1933 he was dean of the mathematics faculty and then dean of the graduate school. After the death of Henry Fine in 1928, he headed the mathematics faculty at Princeton as chairman. Influenced by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity (who worked at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study from the 1930s), he turned to generalizations of Riemannian geometry from 1925 . During his time he wrote widespread textbooks on differential geometry and later also worked on unified field theories in the sense of Einstein.
In 1914 he was Vice President of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and in 1931/32 its President. From 1911 to 1925 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematics and 1917 to 1923 of the Transactions of the AMS. In 1913 he was accepted as an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . From 1922 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , of which he was Vice President from 1945 to 1949. He was multiple honorary doctorates.
The asteroid (20136) Eisenhart was named after him.
Fonts
- Transformations of Surfaces , 2nd edition Chelsea 1966
- Continuous Groups of Transformations , Dover 1961
- Riemannian Geometry , 1926, Princeton University Press 1966
- Non-Riemannian geometry , New York, American Mathematical Society, 1927
- A treatise on the differential geometry of curves and surfaces , Boston, New York, Ginn and Company, 1909
Web links
- Biography of Lefschetz
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Luther P. Eisenhart. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Biography at the APS
- Darren Glass Coble and Eisenhart: two Gettysburgians who led mathematics , Notices AMS, 2013, No. 5
- Literature by and about Luther P. Eisenhart in the bibliographic database WorldCat
Individual evidence
- ^ Member History: Luther P. Eisenhart. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 27, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Eisenhart, Luther P. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 13, 1876 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | York , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 28, 1965 |
| Place of death | Princeton , New Jersey |