George Yuri Rainich

George Yuri Rainich (March 25, 1886, Odessa - October 10, 1968) was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century.

Career

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.

According to some sources, 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.

According to the Editor of the American Mathematical Monthly,^[1][2] Rainich is the inventor of the Rabinowitsch trick, a clever argument to deduce the Hilbert Nullstellensatz from an easier special case. It is later explained^[3] that Rainich was born Rabinowitsch, hence the Pseudonym.

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

Students

Several of Rainich's Ph.D. students became famous:

• 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.

References

• "A Guide to the George Yuri Rainich Papers, 1941-1981". The Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved August 10, 2005. 

• Gönner, Hubert F. M. "On the History of Unified Field Theories". Living Reviews in Relativity. Retrieved August 10, 2005. 

• George Yuri Rainich at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

• Rainich, G. Y. (1925). "Electrodynamics in general relativity". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. (American Mathematical Society) 17 (1): 106. doi:10.2307/1989168. JSTOR 1989168. 

• Rainich, G. Y. "Mathematics of relativity: lecture notes". 

• Rainich, G. Y. (1950). Mathematics of relativity. New York John Wiley & Sons, Inc., London Chapman & Hall, Limited. p. 173. 

Citations