Albert Victor Bäcklund

Albert Victor Bäcklund (* January 11, 1845 in the parish Väsby, Höganäs Municipality, † February 23, 1922 in Lund ) was a Swedish mathematician and physicist.

Life

Albert Bäcklund studied from 1861 at Lund University, among others Astronomy and mathematics. From 1864 he worked at the astronomical observatory in Lund at Axel Möller and in 1868 he became his doctorate with a thesis on astronomical width determination. In 1869 he was a lecturer in astronomy and geometry in Lund. He graduated in 1874 with a travel scholarship in Leipzig by Felix Klein and in Erlangen with Ferdinand von Lindemann. Since 1876 he was an associate professor of mechanics and theoretical physics in Lund. In 1897, he received a full professorship. 1907 to 1909 he was rector at the University of Lund, 1910, he became Professor Emeritus. After his retirement he continued to work on differential geometry, especially in 1916 discovered general relativity.

Backlund worked in the field of contact transformations of Sophus Lie. Today, he is mainly for the named after him Bäcklund transformation between the solutions of partial differential equations known ( Mathematische Annalen, Bd.13 to Bd.19, 1875-1882 ), for example, Have applications in soliton theory. The simplest case are the real and imaginary parts of holomorphic functions which satisfy the Cauchy -Riemann differential equations and the Laplace equation.

In 1888 he became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.