Vladimir Varicak
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Vladimir Varičak (March 1, 1865- January 17, 1942) was a Croatian mathematician and theoretical physicist of Serbian descent.
Varicak studied physics and mathematics at the university of Zagreb from 1883-1887. He made his PhD in 1889 and got his habilitation in. In 1899 he became professor of mathematics in Zagreb, where he gave lectures until his death in 1942.
His work in mathematics was very prolific and expansive, however his most important contributions were interpretations of the theory of special relativity. However, his attempts to reformulate special relativity on a non-Euclidean bases were not successful.
Varičak was a frequent collaborator with Albert Einstein. However, Einstein criticized Varicak's interpretations of special relativity - for example, Varicak believed that length contraction is only an "apparent" or a "psychological" phenomena.
[edit] Sources
- Prvanović, Mileva & Blagojević, Milutin (2006), Vladimir Varičak 1865-1942, in V. Đorđević, D. Vitorović, D. Marinković, Lives and work of the Serbian scientists (Belgrad: Serbian Academy of Sciencies and Arts)
- Walter, S. (1999), The non-Euclidean style of Minkowskian relativity: Vladimir Varicak’s non-Euclidean program, in J. Gray, The Symbolic Universe: Geometry and Physics (Oxford University Press): 91-127
- Miller, A.I. (1981), Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Emergence (1905) and early interpretation (1905–1911), Reading: Addison–Wesley, pp. 249-253, ISBN 0-201-04679-2
- Sauer, T. (2007), The Einstein-Varičak Correspondence on Relativistic Rigid Rotation, in H. Kleinert, R.T. Jantzen and R. Ruffini, Proceedings of the Eleventh Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity (Singapore: World Scientific)
[edit] Publications
- Varičak, V. (1908), “Beiträge zur nichteuklidischen Geometrie”, yearesbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 17: 70–83
- Varičak, V. (1911), “Zum Ehrenfestschen Paradoxon”, Physikalische Zeitschrift 12: 169
- Varičak, V. (1912), “Über die nichteuklidische Interpretation der Relativitätstheorie”, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 21: 103-127
