Lay Scientist Picks
Math for Einstein
Miracles are rarely taken up by science, but the history of science holds a fact as beautiful as a deep equation. A German mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, gave a lecture in 1854 that pole-vaulted past Euclidean geometry and opened up the possibility of more dimensions than humans can perceive. One of humanity’s most stunning achievements in math and physics.
By 1912 to 1915 Albert Einstein was struggling to formalize his relativity theory. (Who knew you could deduce the theory but lack the math to describe it?) He appealed to a friend who stumbled on Riemann’s work in a library.
Riemann’s memory had already been trampled by the dazzling celebrity of quantum mechanics. But Riemann’s mathematics proved to be precisely what Einstein needed.
This is the fact that reverberates: Rieman n had introduced the notion of the metric tensor. It supplied the identical math of the Faraday field for Gravity, quoted in Einstein’s Gravitational Theory.
There’s no law that eerie coincidence can’t be golden fact.