Person: Adams (2), Edwin P.
Edwin Adams studied at Harvard, Göttingen and Cambridge and became Physics Professor at Princeton. He is best known for his translations of some of Einstein's lectures.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- He became Professor of Physics at Princeton University in 1909.
- In 1917 Adams took leave from Princeton and joined the Royal Engineers in the British Army for active service in France.
- He wrote several letters describing his day-to-day experiences during the war.
- These brief glimpses provide an understanding of the daily life of those serving in the War.
- All of our men got away safely in perfect good order and we saved most of our equipment.
- His greatest fame came in 1921 when Einstein first visited Princeton to deliver five Stafford Little lectures on the theory of relativity and to accept an honorary degree.
- Each lecture, which Einstein delivered in German, was followed with a résumé in English by Princeton physicist Edwin P Adams, who was, the Daily Princetonian noted, among the leading American expositors of the relativity theory, along with his Princeton colleagues mathematician Luther P Eisenhart and astrophysicist Henry Norris Russell.
- After being submitted to Einstein for revision and final approval, a transcript of the lectures was translated into English by Professor Adams for publication by Princeton University Press, which gained the distinction of being the first United States publisher to bring out a book by the world's most acclaimed living scientist.
- The Meaning of Relativity has been republished in five editions and is still in print.
- Adams's translations appeared in the New York Evening Post (the first four lectures) and the New York Times (the fifth lecture) a day after the respective lectures.
- Adams was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915.
- In 1945 he retired from Princeton and was made Professor Emeritus.
- Finally we give two examples of Adams' mathematical papers.
- In 1920 he published The potential of ring-shaped discs.
- In 1940 he published Note on a problem in electrostatics.
- The present paper extends this method to the case where the bars are mid-way between parallel planes.
- The consequent numerical calculations are performed with the aid of the reviewer's tables of elliptic functions.
Born 23 January 1878, Prague, Bohemia, Austro-Hungary (now Czech Republic). Died 31 December 1956, Princeton, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Czech Republic
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
