Achilles Papapetrou

Achille Papapetrou ( Achilles Nicholas at Papapetrou, Greek Achilleas Papapetrou Αχιλλέας Παπαπέτρου, born February 2, 1907 in Serres, Greece, † August 12, 1997 in Paris) was a Greek- French theoretical physicist who has been dealing with General Relativity (GR ).

Life

Papapetrou was the son of a school teacher. During World War II, the family was temporarily expelled from Serres in northern Greece by the Turks, but returned. Papapetrou studied from 1925 at the Polytechnic in Athens electrical and mechanical engineering and graduated with a diploma in 1930 from. While still a student he was at the same time an assistant in the mathematics department, which he remained a sideline, when he began to work as a engineer. He published papers on solid state physics and went in 1934 with a scholarship to Paul Ewald at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. There he met Helmut Honl; from their collaboration, developed his interest for the theory of relativity. In 1935, he was at Stuttgart PhD ( study of dendritic growth of crystals ) and then was an assistant in electrical engineering in Athens. 1940 to 1946 he was professor of physics at the Polytechnic in Athens, where he gave seminars on the theory of relativity and he worked during the German occupation in relative isolation. In 1946 he went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin to Erwin Schrödinger, who was working on unified field theories and published with the Papapetrou. From 1948 he was at the University of Manchester, where he was a colleague of Leon Rosenfeld and the equations of motion of the ART worked as well as the equations of motion of particles with spin in the GTR. 1952-1961 he worked as a scientist at the Research Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and from 1957 professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where, among other Dautcourt Georg and Hans -Jürgen Treder were his pupils. From 1962 he worked at the Institute Henri Poincaré (IHP ) in Paris, where he was 1960/61, visiting scientists already and where there was already a strong group of relativity theorists with André Lichnerowicz and Yvonne Choquet - Bruhat. At the same time he was Director of Research at CNRS. In 1975 he became director of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics of the IHP and 1977 he went (formal) to retire, but remained scientifically active. He has been a visiting scientist at Princeton (1964 /65), Vienna (1970 /71), Boston University ( 1972)

He later took French citizenship.

According to him, Papapetrou - Dixon equations, Majumdar - Papapetrou solutions of Einstein's field equations and Weyl - Lewis Papapetrou coordinates are named. He dealt with exact solutions of Einstein's field equations and has long sought a solution for rotating masses, but only Roy Kerr found. Papapetrou was the first who welcomed Kerr's breakthrough on the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics 1963.

Since 1971 he was one of the organizing committees of international conferences on ART (General Relativity and Gravitation, GRG ).

His doctoral counts Rodolfo Gambini.

Writings

  • Special Theory of Relativity, 5th edition, German Academic Publishers, Berlin 1975
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