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LOT 914:
EINSTEIN ALBERT: (1879-1955) German-born Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize winner for Physics, 1921
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EINSTEIN ALBERT: (1879-1955) German-born Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize winner for Physics, 1921
‘It looks suspiciously like witchcraft’
EINSTEIN ALBERT: (1879-1955) German-born Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize winner for Physics, 1921. A.L., unsigned (and seemingly incomplete), two pages, 4to, n.p., n.d. (c.1945-50), to [Ernst Gabor] Straus, in German. Einstein announces 'I am glad that you were able to confirm the negative result regarding the divergence identity' and continues 'Now the point is that you gain confidence in terms of the usefulness, or uselessness, of the particular approach [formula] If it turns out that this does not work, we should return to the series expansion in powers of [formula], of which I wrote to you earlier, with the restriction to the terms that I gave at the time. This is safe, and it must be shown whether those terms have alternating signs. I then know - if this proves to be true, how we can try an approximate solution for the whole area which we can then further examine', further stating 'But today I am writing about another matter, namely a proof for the inequality of adjunction of the equation Ts=0. It looks suspiciously like witchcraft: but there is - as far as I can see at the moment, not a fault in it. I ask you for a critical re-examination, because it is so easy to shoot a buck, especially when a long calculation is included. It is again a matter of proving identities, in a way that I have tried several times without success'. At the foot of the first page Einstein has neatly penned several lines of scientific formulae and to the complete right half of the verso the physicist has meticulously written out over ten lines of other calculations and equations headed Geodatische Linie ('Geodesic Lines'). A letter of good content and interesting association, enhanced and made all the more desirable by Einstein's extensive manuscript formulae. About EX
Ernst Gabor Straus (1922-1983) German-American mathematician of Jewish origin who helped found the theories of Euclidean Ramsey theory and of the arithmetic properties of analytic functions. Straus worked as an assistant to Einstein and collaborated with him on his early work on relativity.
