Václav Hlavatý

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Václav Hlavatý (born January 27, 1894 in Louny , Austria-Hungary , † January 11, 1969 in Bloomington , Indiana ) was a Czechoslovakian - American mathematician .

life and work

After graduating from high school in Louny, Hlavatý studied mathematics and descriptive geometry at the Technical University in Prague, interrupted from military service in the First World War from 1915 to 1918. In 1920 he passed his teaching examination and was then a high school teacher in Vinohrady, 1920 to 1923 in Louny and thereafter until 1931 in Prague. In 1921 he received his doctorate in mathematics from Charles University in Prague . In 1924 he studied at the TU Delft with Jan Schouten and completed his habilitation in 1925 at the Charles University in Prague ( Les congruences dans les espaces non-euclidéens ). In 1926 there was another habilitation at the Technical University in Prague. In 1927/28 he was on a Rockefeller scholarship in Italy and France and in 1928/29 he taught at Oxford. In 1931 he became an associate professor and in 1936 a full professor at Charles University. In 1934 he gave lectures with Schouten at Lomonossow University and in 1936 he took part in the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo (Invariants conformes, geometry de M. Weyl et celle de M. König). In 1937 he was visiting professor in Bucharest and in 1937/38 at the Institute for Advanced Study with Albert Einstein and Hermann Weyl . He spent the Second World War in Prague, where the Czech universities were closed under German occupation. During this time he devoted himself to scientific work, wrote textbooks and also took part in the Prague uprising . Immediately after the war he was a professor again and made guest stays in Poland, the USA and Paris. After a visiting professorship at Indiana University Bloomington in 1948 , he stayed there with his family and became a professor of mathematics there in 1948. In 1962 he retired.

Hlavatý dealt with differential geometry and general relativity and their generalizations ( unified field theories ), as did his teacher Schouten, who played a leading role internationally in this field. He corresponded with Albert Einstein about his unified field theories, but also worked on other unified field theories such as those of Hermann Weyl and Erwin Schrödinger .

In 1926 he became a member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences and a few years later of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts . In 1958 he founded the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in America and became its first president. In 1991 he received the Masaryk Memorial Order . He was a member of the Česká strana národně sociální party , for which he briefly served as a member of parliament in 1945/1946.

He was married twice. He had a daughter from his second marriage (marriage in 1931) to Olga Neumann.

Works

  • Literature and other media by and about Václav Hlavatý in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
  • Les courbes de la variété générale à n dimensions, Paris, Gauthier-Villars 1934
  • Differential geometry of curves and surfaces and tensor calculus, Groningen / Batavia, Noordhoff 1939 (translated by Max Pinl )
  • Differential line geometry, Groningen: Noordhoff 1945 (translated by Max Pinl)
    • English translation: Differential Line Geometry, Groningen 1953
  • Projective Geometry 1940 (Czech)
  • Geometry of Einstein's Unified Field Theory, Groningen, Noordhoff, 1957

literature

  • Banesh Hoffmann (editor) Perspectives in geometry and relativity: essays in honor of Václav Hlavatý , Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1966

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hubert Goenner On the History of Unified Field Theories , Chapter 9, Living Reviews ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / relativity.livingreviews.org
  2. ↑ George Kovtun The Czechs in America
personal data
SURNAME Hlavatý, Václav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Louny , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 1969
Place of death Bloomington , Indiana