John Lighton Synge

John Lighton Synge ( born March 23, 1897 in Dublin, † March 30, 1995 ) was an Irish- Canadian mathematician and theoretical physicist, which dealt mainly with general relativity theory, geometric mechanics and optics.

Synge visited the St. Andrews College in Dublin and studied there from 1915 at Trinity College. In 1919, he graduated with a master's degree in mathematics and physics and received at the same time the gold medal of the College. 1920 to 1925 he was assistant professor in Toronto. In 1925, he returned as a professor of physics ( " Natural Philosophy " ) return to Trinity College, where he was also a Fellow. In 1930 he was back in Toronto as Professor of Applied Mathematics. In 1939 he was at Princeton University, 1941 Visiting Professor at Brown University, 1943 Dean of the Mathematics faculty at Ohio State University and in 1946, after two years as a ballistics expert with the U.S. Air Force, in the same capacity at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1948, he was a colleague of Erwin Schrödinger as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Dublin in 1940 founded the Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1972, he went there to retire.

In 1943 he became a member of the Royal Society of London and the London Mathematical Society. He was also a member of the Royal Society of Canada ( he was the first recipient of its Henry Marshall Tory Medal) and the Royal Irish Academy, which he was president from 1961 to 1964. According to him, a prize awarded every two years at Trinity College in Dublin is named.

Synge's publication list includes more than 200 works on various areas of theoretical and mathematical physics. He has taken through his teaching ( and not least some very well known textbooks) great influence on the development of general relativity, as this still stagnated in the 1950s. In particular, he gave in the presentation of the theory a geometric embedding. He also wrote textbooks on mechanics and geometrical optics, in which he worked out William Rowan Hamilton's uniform geometric access to both areas.

In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm (The Hamiltonian method Applied to water waves ).

He was married to Eleanor Mabel Allen, with whom he had two daughters. Cathleen Synge Morawetz His daughter is also a well-known mathematician; his uncle John Millington Synge was a noted playwright.

In his honor, is awarded the John L. Synge Award.

Works

  • Synge: Talking about relativity. North Holland, 1970.
  • Synge: Tensor Calculus. University of Toronto Press, 1964, 1969.
  • Synge, Byron Griffith: Principles of Mechanics. 1942 McGraw Hill, 3rd edition, 1959.
  • Synge: Classical Dynamics. In: Siegfried Flügge (ed.): Encyclopedia of physics - principles of classical dynamics and field theory. In 1960.
  • Synge: Relativity - the General Theory. North Holland 1960.
  • Synge: General Relativity. In: de Witt ( ed.): Relativity, Dynamics and Topology. Les Houches Lectures 1963.
  • Synge: Relativity - the Special Theory. North Holland, 1965, 2nd edition 1972.
  • Synge: The hyper circle in mathematical physics - a method for the solution of boundary value problems. Cambridge 1957.
  • Synge: Geometrical optics - an introduction to Hamilton's method. Cambridge 1937.
  • Synge: Science: Sense and Nonsense, London: Cape, 1951
  • Synge: Kandelman 's Crimea; A Realistic Fantasy, London: Cape, 1957
  • Synge: Relativistic Hydrodynamics, Proc. London Math Soc., Volume 43, 1937, pp. 376-416
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