Elwin Bruno Christoffel (1829 - 1900)

Born 10 Nov 1829 in Montjoie, Rhineland, Prussia, Germany

Ancestors

Died 15 Mar 1900 at age 70 in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, Germany

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Biography

Elwin Christoffel is Notable.

Elwin was born in 1829. He passed away in 1900. He was a German mathematician and physicist. He introduced fundamental concepts of differential geometry, opening the way for the development of tensor calculus, which would later provide the mathematical basis for general relativity.

Christoffel is mainly remembered for his seminal contributions to differential geometry. In a famous 1869 paper on the equivalence problem for differential forms in n variables, published in Crelle's Journal, he introduced the fundamental technique later called covariant differentiation and used it to define the Riemann–Christoffel tensor (the most common method used to express the curvature of Riemannian manifolds). In the same paper he introduced the Christoffel symbols which express the components of the Levi-Civita connection with respect to a system of local coordinates. Christoffel's ideas were generalized and greatly developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and his student Tullio Levi-Civita, who turned them into the concept of tensors and the absolute differential calculus. The absolute differential calculus, later named tensor calculus, forms the mathematical basis of the general theory of relativity.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Elwin Bruno Christoffel
• Wikidata: Item Q58795, en:Wikipedia
• "Deutschland Geburten und Taufen, 1558-1898", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VHW2-S6B : 26 March 2020), Elwin Bruno Christoffel, 1829.