12. The Einstein-Grossmann collaboration
In memoriam: Marcel Grossmann12a. From Prague to Zurich
Grossmann appeared in previous chapters as the helpful fellow student who made
his course notes available to Einstein, as the helpful friend who together with his
father paved the way for Einstein's appointment at the patent office in Bern, and
as the friend to whom Einstein dedicated his doctoral thesis. It is now time to get
better acquainted with him.
Grossmann, a descendant of an old Swiss family, was born in 1878 in Budapest,
where his father was employed. He spent his first fifteen years there, then went
to Switzerland, where he finished high school. Thereupon he studied at the ETH
from 1896 to 1900, together with Einstein. During the next seven years, he taught
high school, first in Frauenfeld and then in Basel. In that period he finished his
thesis, 'On the Metrical Properties of Collinear Structures,' which earned him his
doctoral degree at the University of Zurich, and published two geometry books for
high school students and three papers on non-Euclidean geometry, his favorite
subject. These papers contain very pretty planimetric constructions which, we are
told, were praised by one no less than Hilbert [SI]. After a six-year pause, he
published another four papers on related subjects in the years 1910-12. He pre-
sented one of these at the fifth international congress of mathematicians in Cam-
bridge, England, in August 1912 [Gl]. The mentioned papers are his entire sci-
entific output prior to the collaboration with Einstein, which began a few months
after the Cambridge conference. Evidently none of his prior research had any
bearing on differential geometry or tensor analysis.
Grossmann had meanwhile joined the mathematics faculty at the ETH in
Zurich, first as a stand-in and then, in 1907, as a full professor of geometry. Soon
thereafter, he began to organize summer courses for high school teachers. In 1910
he became one of the founders of the Swiss Mathematical Society. The next year
he was appointed dean of the mathematics-physics section of the ETH.
One of the first acts of the uncommonly young dean was to sound out Einstein
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