Luther P. Eisenhart

Luther Pfahler Eisenhart (13 January 1876 – 28 October 1965) was an American mathematician, best known today for his contributions to semi-Riemannian geometry.

Eisenhart was born in York, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Gettysburg College in 1896. He earned his doctorate in 1900 at Johns Hopkins University, where he was influenced (at long range) by the work of Gaston Darboux. During the next two decades, Eisenhart's research focused on moving frames after the French school, but around 1925 took a different turn when he became enamored of the mathematical challenges and entrancing beauty of a radical new theory of gravitation, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Eisenhart played a central role in American mathematics in the early twentieth century. He served as chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton University and later as Dean of the Graduate School there. He is widely credited with guiding the development in America of the mathematical background needed for the further development of general relativity, through his influential textbooks and his personal interaction with Albert Einstein, Oswald Veblen, and John von Neumann at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study, as well as with gifted students such as Abraham Haskel Taub.

References

*cite book | author=Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler | title=Transformations of Surfaces (2nd ed.) | location=New York | publisher=Chelsea | year=1966 | id=LCCN 62011699
*cite book | author=Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler | title=Continuous Groups of Transformations | location=New York | publisher=Dover | year=1961 (org. pub. 1933) | id=LCCN 61003361/L
*cite book | author=Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler | title=Riemannian Geometry | location=Princeton | publisher=Princeton University Press | year=1966 (org. pub. 1926) | id=OCLC 5836010
*Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler, "Non-Riemannian geometry", New York, American Mathematical Society, 1927
*Eisenhart, Luther Pfahler, "A treatise on the differential geometry of curves and surfaces" Boston: New York [etc.] Ginn and Company, [c1909]

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