George Yuri Rainich

George Yuri Rainich (March 25, 1886, Odessa - 1968) was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century.

Rainich studied mathematics in Odessa and Munich, eventually obtaining his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Kazan. In 1922, he emigrated to the United States, and after three years at Johns Hopkins University, joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he remained until his retirement in 1956.

Rainich's research centered around general relativity and early work toward a unified field theory. In 1924, Rainich found a set of equivalent conditions for a Lorentzian manifold to admit an interpretation as an exact non-null electrovacuum solution in general relativity; these are now known as the Rainich conditions.

The story is told that Peter Gabriel Bergmann brought Rainich's suggestion that algebraic topology (and knot theory in particular) should play a role in physics to the attention of John Archibald Wheeler, which shortly led to the Ph.D. thesis of Charles W. Misner. Another version of this tale replaces Bergmann with Hugh Everett, who was a fellow student of Misner at the time.

Several of Rainich's Ph.D. students are noteworthy:

* Ruel Vance Churchill (b. 1899) is well known to several generations of mathematics students as a coauthor of a standard textbook known as "Churchill & Brown",

* Marjorie Lee Browne (9 September 1914-19 October 1979) was the second African-American woman to receive a doctoral degree in the U.S.

Rainich's private papers are held at the University of Texas.

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