Engelbert Schücking
Engelbert Schücking (born 1926, in English-language works often cited as E. L. Schucking) is a physics professor at New York University in New York City. His research interests are theoretical astrophysics, general relativity and cosmology.
Biography
Engelbert Schücking was born on May 23, 1926, in Hörde, Germany. He manifested an interest in astronomy at a very early age, and by the age of fourteen, he was actively engaged in counting sunspots. He then studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster, and later at Goettingen. His professors included such luminaries as Werner Heisenberg, Richard Becker and Pohl. He started working in the field of general relativity with the great German physicist Pascual Jordan in Hamburg, in 1952, and he earned his PhD there in 1955. It is with P.Jordan that he found the locus of his life's work, namely the geometric aspects of general relativity and Einstein's field equations. He moved to the US in 1961, where he became Research associate, first at Syracuse, then at Cornell. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1962, where he became Professor of Physics. There, he started a group working on general relativity, comprising such first rate physicists as Roger Penrose, Roy Kerr, Ray Sachs and Jürgen Ehlers. In 1967, he was appointed as Professor of Physics at New York University, where he had many students, including some twenty successful PhD candidates. Some of these students went on to become famous specialists in the field of general relativity: Eli Honig, Richard Greene, C.V.Vishveshwara, to name but a few. He published numerous papers and co-authored many books about gravitation, cosmology, black holes...
A misnomer
Despite its title, the book: On Einstein's Path: Essays in Honor of E.L. Schucking (Springer) is in fact a collection of essays on various advanced aspects of general relativity and cosmology. Although written "in honor" of Englebert Schücking, these essays have very little to do with Schücking himself. Only the Preface (written by Alex Harvey), and the first(written by Schücking) and last essays contain some historical material related to this physicist, from which the current article was inspired. Therefore, it is not recommended for anyone with less than a PhD in general relativity and related subjects.
External links
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