Walther Mayer

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Walther Mayer (born March 11, 1887 in Graz , † September 10, 1948 in Princeton ) was an Austrian mathematician.

Life

Mayer studied from 1907 at the ETH Zurich , from 1909 at the University of Vienna as well as at the University of Göttingen and the Sorbonne and received his doctorate in 1912 at the University of Vienna on the Fredholm integral equation (application of the Fredholm functional equation to some special boundary value problems of the logarithmic potential). In World War I he was a soldier from 1914 to 1919 (where he was seriously wounded in Russia) and then devoted himself to mathematics, where he was financially independent and owned a small coffee house. In 1926 he completed his habilitation in differential geometry and became a private lecturer at the University of Vienna, where his progress was severely hampered due to the anti-Semitic atmosphere at the university (Mayer was a Jew ). On the recommendation of Richard von Mises he went to Albert Einstein as his assistant in 1929 , initially in Berlin and from 1933 in Princeton. Einstein insisted on Mayer as an assistant in an independent position in negotiations with the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1933 Mayer became a permanent member as an associate (a position that remained unique at the IAS).

He worked with Einstein on his program of generalized field theories to unite electrodynamics and gravity . Initially they dealt with theories with far parallelism and in 1930 a five- dimensional theory inspired by the Kaluza-Klein theory. At Princeton he was Einstein's computer ( Einstein's calculator known), but in the United States, he published only one working with Einstein (via semi vectors in continuation of works in Berlin) and returned to differential geometry and topology to.

The Mayer-Vietoris sequence in the topology is named after him and Leopold Vietoris . He also gave an early axiomatic treatment of homology .

Fonts

  • with Adalbert Duschk : Textbook of differential geometry. 2 volumes, Teubner 1930.
  • About abstract topology. In: Monthly books for mathematics. Volume 36, 1929, pp. 1-42 (Mayer-Vietoris sequences)
  • with TY Thomas: Foundations of the theory of Lie groups. In: Annals of Mathematics. 36, 1935, 770-822.
  • A new homology theory. In: Annals of Mathematics. Volume 43, 1942, pp. 370-380, 594-605.
  • The Duality Theory and the Basic Isomorphisms of Group Systems and Nets and Co-Nets of Group Systems. In: Annals of Mathematics. Volume 46, 1945, pp. 1-28
  • On Products in Topology. In: Annals of Mathematics. Volume 46, 1945, pp. 29-57.
  • Duality theorems. In: Fundamenta Math. 35, 1948, 188–202.

literature

  • Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein . Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 492-494.
  • Maximilian Pinl , Auguste Dick , Colleagues in a Dark Time , Annual Report DMV, Volume 75, 1973, pp. 199–201

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walther Mayer in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Walther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1948
Place of death Princeton