Einstein’s letters credit Greek maths expert’s work, Greece and Israel say from PhysOrg.com
ATHENS (AFP) - Greece has received copies of letters by Albert Einstein which suggest that the work of an unheralded Greek mathematician helped shape some of his theories, Greek and Israeli officials said.
Israel’s ambassador to Athens, Ram Aviram, presented the Greek foreign ministry with copies of 10 letters between Einstein and Greek mathematician Constantine Karatheodoris, part of a long correspondence which lasted from 1916 to 1930.
According to experts at the National Archives of Israel — custodians of the original letters — the mathematical side of Einstein’s physics theory was partly substantiated through the work of Karatheodoris, Aviram told AFP.
“The correspondence between the two mathematicians is intensive and quite close,” Aviram said. “At a certain moment, they called themselves in private names.”
The son of a Greek-born diplomat who served as the Ottoman Empire’s ambassador to Berlin, Karatheodoris who was born in 1873 and died in 1950 taught mathematics at four German universities — including those of Munich and Goettingen — and also worked on physics and archaeological engineering.
His scientific papers are in the collection of Goettingen University, and have never been translated into Greek, though a number of American universities have copies of his theories, said deputy foreign minister Evripidis Stylianidis.
The Greek authorities intend to create a museum honouring Karatheodoris in Komotini, a major town of the northeastern Greek region where his family came from.
Interesting that they call Einstein a mathematician, as I’ve always thought of him as a theoretical physicist, rather than a mathematical physicist. The only thing mathematical I associate with Uncle Albert is the Einstein summation convention.
Professor Rodney Baxter, from the Mathematical Sciences Institute at ANU, received both the 2006 Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society (APS) and the separate Onsager Lectureship and Medal for 2006 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Both prizes are named for widely respected theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Lars Onsager, who exactly calculated the order parameter of the Ising model in 1949. This was the first such calculation for a statistical mechanical model of magnetism. He received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his earlier work on irreversible thermodynamics.
“These awards are particularly pleasing for me as it is recognition of work on the order parameters of the chiral Potts model, which is research in the Lars Onsager tradition,” Professor Baxter said.
In his research, Professor Baxter showed by careful mathematical analysis that numerical predictions about the order parameters of the chiral Potts model were exactly right, something which had been elusive for mathematicians in the 15 years before his proof.
Simply, the complicated chiral Potts model is a prototype of theoretical descriptions of the interaction and behaviour of materials at the molecular level. It includes the Ising model as a special case.
The “exact solution” of the chiral Potts model achieved by Professor Baxter has important implications in the physical sciences. It greatly increases confidence in theoretical models, particularly in materials science, where physicists around the world, and at ANU, are building next generation electronic devices using two-dimensional layers in ‘chips’. These specialised ‘chips’ may eventually be used in computing, audiovisual technologies and advanced telecommunications.
The American Physical Society prize is awarded to recognise outstanding research in theoretical statistical physics. It awarded Professor Baxter the Prize for “his original and groundbreaking contributions to the field of exactly solved models in statistical mechanics, which continue to inspire profound developments in statistical physics and related fields”.
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