Alexander Friedman

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Alexander Friedman
Alexander Friedman

Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman or Friedmann (Russian: Александр Александрович Фридман) (June 16, 1888, Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia – September 16, 1925, Leningrad, USSR) was a Russian and Soviet cosmologist and mathematician. He discovered the expanding-universe solution to general relativity field equations in 1922, which was corroborated by Edwin Hubble's observations in 1929.(Ferguson, 1991: 67). Friedmann's 1924 papers, including "Über die Möglichkeit einer Welt mit konstanter negativer Krümmung des Raumes" (On the possibility of a world with constant negative curvature of space) published by the German physics journal Zeitschrift für Physik (Vol. 21, pp. 326-332), demonstrated that he had command of all three Friedmann models describing positive, zero and negative curvature respectively, a decade before Robertson and Walker published their analysis.

This dynamical cosmological model of general relativity would come to form the standard for the Big Bang and steady state theories. Friedman's work supports both theories equally, so it was not until the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation that the steady state theory was abandoned in favor of the current favorite Big Bang paradigm.

He also performed measurements of atmosphere properties with a balloon.

Alexander Friedmann lived much of his life in Leningrad. He fought in World War I (on behalf of Imperial Russia) as a bomber and later lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917. He also taught another famous physicist, George Gamow. Friedmann died young at age 37 due to typhoid fever.

[edit] References

  • Ferguson, Kitty (1991). Stephen Hawking: Quest For A Theory of Everything. Franklin Watts. ISBN 0-553-29895-X.
  • Friedman, A: Über die Krümmung des Raumes, Z. Phys. 10 (1922), 377-386. (English translation in: Gen. Rel. Grav. 31 (1999), 1991-2000.)
  • Friedmann, A: Über die Möglichkeit einer Welt mit konstanter negativer Krümmung des Raumes, Z. Phys. 21, (1924), 326-332. (English translation in: Gen. Rel. Grav. 31 (1999), 2001-2008.)

[edit] External link

  • O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Alexander Friedman". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
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