1. Marcel Grossmann was a Swiss mathematician who was a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein.
12 Facts About Marcel Grossmann
2.
Marcel Grossmann became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.
3.
In 1900 Grossmann graduated from the Federal Polytechnic School and became an assistant to the geometer Wilhelm Fiedler.
4.
Marcel Grossmann continued to do research on non-Euclidean geometry and taught in high schools for the next seven years.
5.
Marcel Grossmann was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1912 at Cambridge and in 1920 at Strasbourg.
6.
Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school days in Zurich.
7.
Marcel Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and it was Marcel Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic.
8.
Marcel Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical framework for Einstein's work on gravity.
9.
Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Marcel Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well.
10.
Marcel Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Elwin Bruno Christoffel and fully developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita.
11.
Marcel Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.
12.
The collaboration of Einstein and Marcel Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper, "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation", which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.