Person: Infeld, Leopold
Leopold Infeld was a Polish physicist who worked in the theory of relativity.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Infeld wanted desperately to escape and be able to go to university, so he begged his parents to allow him to attend a gymnasium which would prepare him for university entrance.
- Infeld certainly was not going to give up his ambitions that easily, so he studied on his own to enable him to take the 'matura' exams.
- After two years spent in Konin, Infeld was appointed as a physics teacher at a Jewish gymnasium for girls in Warsaw.
- Unable to work through grief, and realising that progress in Lwów would be well nigh impossible, Infeld decided to accept a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to study in Cambridge, England.
- The result of this collaboration was the Born-Infeld electrodynamics.
- In Princeton, Infeld collaborated with Einstein writing a popular text Evolution of Physics (1938).
- In 1938 Infeld received an offer from J L Synge of a professorship at the University of Toronto.
- Already famed as a collaborator of Einstein, Infeld published many important papers over the next few years.
- Infeld had all his life been a pacifist.
- The agent had been assigned to report on guest speaker Dr Leopold Infeld, then Canada's greatest physicist.
- A professor at the University of Toronto, Infeld was well known as a close collaborator of Albert Einstein.
- It was a great prize for Canada's scientific community when, 10 years earlier, Dr Infeld left the United States to come north.
- Like Einstein, Infeld was a peace activist.
- Parliament denounced Infeld as a traitor who planned, if he hadn't done so already, to provide Russia with atomic secrets.
- the allegations against Infeld were based on rumour.
- In it are collected "final results" of the study, begun by Infeld with Einstein and Hoffmann in Princeton in 1938, and carried on by him with his students in Warsaw during the last decade, of the problem of motion in the general relativity theory of gravitation.
- Infeld's return to Poland had been greatly welcomed but life under the Communist regime became increasingly difficult.
Born 20 August 1898, Kraków, Austria-Hungary (now Poland). Died 15 January 1968, Warsaw, Poland.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Poland
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
