Alfred Schild

Alfred Schild (September 7, 1921 – May 24, 1977) was a leading

Biography

Schild was born in

In 1957 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin. In 1962 he became Ashbel Smith Professor and founded the Center for Relativity at University of Texas, Austin.^[4] Engelbert Schücking described the recruitment of professors for the Center:

In 1962 Alfred got me an associate professorship in the Austin mathematics department, and in the summer of 1962, while attending

Ray Sachs, Jürgen Ehlers, Luis Bel and others to flock to the newly created center of gravity in Austin.^[5]

In 1965, Schild found the Kerr–Schild form of the spacetime metric.

A dramatization of the calculation of the

While Schild waited patiently in the armchair, Kerr began calculating at his desk...Kerr put down his pencil and looked up...Schild jumped out of his chair beaming. He appeared to be far more excited than Kerr himself and clearly knew what this meant.[6]^: 75

In a 1970 seminar at Princeton University, Schild introduced an important mathematical construction now known as Schild's Ladder, which is used in differential geometry.

Schild clarified and enlarged general relativity through his studies of single-particle motion, quantization, special solutions and the conformal structure of space-time. ... His expositions of tensor analysis and relativity are still among the best and clearest treatments of these subjects.^[7]

Professor Schild died on May 24, 1977, in

The science fiction novel Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan drew heavily on concepts introduced or refined by Schild.

References