Search results for "Ricci calculus"
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The role of virtual work in Levi-Civita's parallel transport
2015
The current literature on history of science reports that Levi-Civita’s parallel transport was motivated by his attempt to provide the covariant derivative of the absolute differential calculus with a geometrical interpretation (For instance, see Scholz in The intersection of history and mathematics, Birkhauser, Basel, pp 203–230, 1994, Sect. 4). Levi-Civita’s memoir on the subject was explicitly aimed at simplifying the geometrical computation of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. In the present paper, we wish to point out the possible role implicitly played by the principle of virtual work in Levi-Civita’s conceptual reasoning to formulate parallel transport.
Personal Reflections on Dirk Jan Struik By Joseph W. Dauben
2018
Dirk Jan Struik, who taught for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died on 21 October 2000 at the age of 106, was a distinguished mathematician and influential teacher. He was also widely known as a leading Marxist scholar and social activist. His early work on vector and tensor analysis, undertaken together with Jan Arnoldus Schouten, helped impart new mathematical techniques needed to master Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This collaboration lasted for over 20 years, but by the end of the 1930s, Struik came to realize that the heyday of the Ricci calculus had passed. After the Second World War, having now entered his 50s, he gave up mathematical research …