Wolfgang Rindler
| Wolfgang Rindler | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
May 18, 1924 Vienna, Austria |
| Alma mater |
University of Liverpool Imperial College London |
| Occupation | Physicist |
| Employer | University of Texas at Dallas |
| Known for | Coining phrase "event horizon", physics text books |
| Title | Professor |
| Website | http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/faculty/wolfgang.html |
Wolfgang Rindler (born 18 May 1924, Vienna) is a physicist working in the field of General Relativity where he is known for introducing the term "event horizon", Rindler coordinates, and (in collaboration with Roger Penrose) for popularizing the use of spinors in general relativity. He is also a prolific textbook author.
Life and career
Rindler is the son of a lawyer. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he fled before the Nazis to England in the course of the so-called Kindertransport in 1938. Rindler gained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Liverpool and his PhD. from Imperial College London. In 1956 he was at the Cornell University and starting with 1963 at the new founded Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, later called University of Texas at Dallas, where he is still (2013) professor. He was visiting scholar at King's College London (1961/62), at the University La Sapienza in Rome (1968/69), at the University of Vienna (1975, 1987), at the Cambridge University (Churchill College, 1990).
Rindler has written several textbooks on theoretical physics and relativity. The first edition of his textbook Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological was published in 1969 by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company; the second edition was published by Springer-Verlag in 1977.
See also
References
- Rindler, Wolfgang (2001). Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850836-0. A widely used textbook.
- Rindler, Wolfgang (1987). Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 1, Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields (with Roger Penrose) ISBN 0-521-33707-0 (paperback)
- Rindler, Wolfgang (1988). Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 2, Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry (with Roger Penrose) (reprint), ISBN 0-521-34786-6 (paperback)