Alfred Schild

Alfred Schild was a leading Austrian American physicist, well known for his contributions to the Golden age of general relativity (1960–1975). Schild was born in Istanbul, Turkey, to German-speaking Viennese Jews, but his early education was in England. Upon the outbreak of World War II, Schild was interned as an enemy alien because he had a German passport, but later he was sent to Canada, where he was allowed to continue his education. He earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1944, and by 1946 completed his M.A. and doctorate under the direction of Leopold Infeld, a close colleague of Albert Einstein. This association led Schild to a deep interest in relativity. Schild spent the next eleven years at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he helped to develop the first atomic clocks, which checked the theory of relativity in space. As tensors are the language of general relativity, he coauthored Tensor Calculus with John L. Synge in 1949.

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. In 1965, Schild found the Kerr–Schild form of the spacetime metric. 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. He was also one of the founders of the International Committee on Gravitation and General Relativity, the Center for Particle Theory, the Center for Statistical Mechanics, and the Center for Relativity Theory at the University of Texas. He was a member of the Canadian Congress of Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society.

Sources: Wikipedia and Source: Texas State Historical Association