Luther P. Eisenhart
Luther Pfahler Eisenhart ( born January 13, 1876 in York (Pennsylvania ), † 28 October 1965 Princeton ) was an American mathematician.
Life and work
Eisenhart studied Mathematics at Gettysburg College ( BA 1896) and at Johns Hopkins University, where he was in 1900 received his doctorate with a thesis on differential geometry ( infinitesimal deformation of Surfaces ), who was strongly attached to the tradition of Gaston Darboux, whose textbooks on differential geometry Eisenhart had studied. From 1900 he was at Princeton University, where he became professor in 1909 and emeritus in 1945. But even after his retirement, he remained mathematically active. 1925 to 1933 he was dean of the Mathematics Department and then Dean ( Dean ) of the Graduate School. After the death of Henry Fine 1928, he served as chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton. Influenced by the General Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein (who at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study worked from the 1930s ) he turned to from 1925 generalizations of Riemannian geometry. He wrote in his time used textbooks on differential geometry and also worked on unified field theories in the sense of Einstein later.
In 1914, he was vice president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and 1931/32 its president. 1911 to 1925 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematics and 1917-1923 of the Transactions of the AMS. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was vice-president from 1945 to 1949 since 1922. He was more honorary doctorates.
The asteroid ( 20136 ) Eisenhart has been named after him.
Writings
- Transformations of Surfaces, 2nd edition Chelsea 1966
- Continuous Groups of Transformations, Dover 1961
- Riemannian Geometry, 1926, Princeton University Press 1966
- Non- Riemannian geometry, New York, American Mathematical Society, 1927
- A treatise on the differential geometry of curves and surfaces, Boston, New York, Ginn and Company, 1909