Aleksei Zinovyevich Petrov

Alexei Zinovievich Petrov (Russian: Алексей Зиновьевич Петров, English transliteration Alexey Petrov Zinovievich; born October 28, 1910 in Koschki, Samara province, † May 9, 1972 in Kiev ) was a Russian mathematician and theoretical physicist, known for his classification of exact solutions in of general relativity.

Life and work

Petrov was born the eleventh of twelve children of a village priest. He lost his father early and his mother gave him and his younger brother to an aunt, after also burned down the house. For financial reasons, he had to stop training as a teacher and worked as a carpenter and then in 1931 with his brother in the construction of a power plant in Kazan, where he prepared the same time in self-study on the entrance exams at the university. He studied from 1932 mathematics and physics at the University of Kazan among others Chebotaryov and Shirokov, which he also found his later main field of the differential-geometric study of problems of general relativity (theory of so-called Einstein - rooms). He then worked as a teacher, while he worked on his doctorate. In 1941 he commanded a mortar battery in front of Moscow and could therefore only in 1943 to defend his Ph.D. on a short furlough. In the same year he was severely wounded and discharged from the army. He taught in Kazan at the flying school and then at university.

He is known for his algebraic classification ( " Petrov- classification " ) of Einstein spaces ( that is, the curvature tensor for the case of matter -free Einstein - rooms), which he managed from 1952 to 1954. In 1957 he habilitated about it in at the Lomonosov University in Moscow (Russian doctorate ). Despite serious health problems ( myocarditis), which forced him to long hospital stays, he devoted himself against medical advice intense research. In 1956 he became professor of geometry in Kazan and in 1960 professor at the newly created Department of relativity and gravitational physics. He represented the topic both nationally and internationally as a representative of the Soviet Union in the International Committee for the theory of relativity and gravitation as a scientific organizer. In 1969 he was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and from 1970 was Head of relativity and gravitation at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Academy in Kiev. There, too, he was often in the hospital and died from the effects of an operation.

Writings

• Space, time and matter, 1961 (Russian, popular science )
• Einstein spaces, Akademie Verlag, 1964 ( edited by Hans -Jürgen Treder ), Moscow 1961 Russian original
• New methods of general relativity, Russian, Moscow, Nauka, 1966
• Classification of spaces defined by gravitational fields (in Russian ), Uch. Zapiski Kazan Gos. Univ. ( Scientific papers of the State University of Kazan ), Bd.114, 1954, pp. 55-69 English translation of " Classification of spaces defined by gravitational fields". General Relativity and Gravitation, Bd.22, 2000, pp. 1665, also reprinted in George FR Ellis, Malcolm AH MacCallum, Andrzej Krasinski (ed.) Golden Oldies in General Relativity. Hidden Gems, Springer Verlag, 2013, with biography of Petrov of Asya Aminova