Ludwik Silberstein

Ludwik Silberstein (May 17, 1872 – January 17, 1948) was a Polish-American physicist who helped make special relativity and general relativity staples of university coursework. His textbook The Theory of Relativity was published by Macmillan in 1914 with a second edition, expanded to include general relativity, in 1924.

Life

Silberstein was born on May 17, 1872, in Warsaw to Samuel Silberstein and Emily Steinkalk. He was educated in Kraków, Heidelberg, and Berlin. To teach he went to Bologna, Italy from 1899 to 1904. Then he took a position at Sapienza University of Rome.

In 1907 Silberstein described a bivector approach to the fundamental electromagnetic equations. When

E

{\displaystyle \mathbf {E} }

and

B

{\displaystyle \mathbf {B} }

represent electric and magnetic vector fields with values in

R

3

{\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}}

, then Silberstein suggested

E

+

i

B

{\displaystyle \mathbf {E} +i\mathbf {B} }

would have values in

C

3

{\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{3}}

, consolidating the field description with complexification. This contribution has been described as a crucial step in modernizing Maxwell's equations, while

E

+

i

B

{\displaystyle \mathbf {E} +i\mathbf {B} }

is known as the Riemann–Silberstein vector.

Silberstein taught in Rome until 1920, when he entered private research for the Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, New York.