Abraham Haskel Taub

Abraham Haskel Taub ( born 1 February 1911 in Chicago; † August 9, 1999 ) was an American theoretical physicist and mathematician.

Life and work

Taub studied mathematics at the University of Chicago ( Bachelor 1931) and at Princeton University, among others, Howard Percy Robertson, John von Neumann, Oswald Veblen. He received his doctorate in 1935 at Robertson (mathematical ) cosmology. 1935/36, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Veblen, as well as several more times later (1940 /41, 1947/48, 1962/63 ). In the 1930s he worked with Veblen and von Neumann on the then current projective theory of relativity ( a Kaluza-Klein theory) and the Dirac equation and spinors in cosmological solutions of general relativity. He became a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. During World War II he was from 1942 to 1945 the house theorist in a run by Walter Bleakney in Princeton research group that shock waves investigated experimentally in shock -wave tubes ( shock tubes). Although it was a highly non- linear theory, scored Taub good agreement with the experiments on the shock wave tubes - the results were published after the war in the Reviews of Modern Physics. In 1946 he was awarded the Presidency Certificate of Merite for this work. In 1948 he went to the University of Illinois, where he was involved in a leading position in the construction of ORDVAC computer, the 1952 delivered to the Ballistic Research Center of the U.S. Army 's Aberdeen Proving Ground. Also the construction of the ( remaining at the university ) successor model Illiac he was involved and from 1961 to 1964 head of the computer laboratories of the University. 1964 until his retirement in 1978 he was professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1964 to 1968 director of the Computer Center. Even after his retirement, he remained scientifically active until the 1990s.

Taub is best known for his contributions to general relativity and its cosmological solutions of the theory of shock waves, and in particular the relativistic hydrodynamics, for which he was considered a leading expert. In a paper in the Annals of Mathematics in 1951 he used a differential geometric Klassifikationstheorem by Luigi Bianchi (1897 ) to the Ricci flat spatially homogeneous (3 1) dimensional space - times to be classified in cosmology (one of the so solutions found, the deaf universe, was named after him ). He wore about also on the ICM 1950. He also dealt with differential geometry and numerical analysis, taking his teacher von Neumann (whose collected works he edited until 1963 with 1961 ) was as a pioneer of numerical hydrodynamics on early computers.

1947/48 and 1958 he was Guggenheim Fellow. He was from 1951 to 1960 in the advisory committee of the National Bureau of Standards and also temporarily advisor to the Argonne National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Consequences of variational principles in general relativity ).

He was married in 1935 and had two daughters and a son.

Writings

• Relativistic Rankine - Hugoniot Equations, Physical Review Bd.74, 1948, p.328
• With Bleakney: Interaction of Shock Waves, Reviews of Modern Physics, Bd.21, 1949, S.584
• Determination of flows behind stationary and pseudo- stationary shocks, Annals of Mathematics, Bd.62, 1955, S.300 - 325th
• A general relativistic variational principle for perfect fluids, Physical Review, Bd.94, 1954, S.1468
• Empty space -times Admitting a three parameter group of motions, Annals of Mathematics, Bd.53, 1951, S.472 - 490th
• Relativistic fluid mechanics, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Bd.10, 1978
• Relativistic Hydrodynamics, in Taub (Editor) Studies in applied mathematics, 1971, p.235
• Publisher with Sidney Fernbach: Computers and Their role in the physical sciences, Gordon and Breach 1970