HISTORY | MATHS
Karl Schwarzschild’s Letter to Albert Einstein
“Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman, or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”
“Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, march in one front. Whichever lags behind is drawn after. Whichever hastens ahead helps on the others.”
Karl Schwarzschild was born in Frankfurt, Germany on the 9th of October 1873, to a Jewish family. He developed an interest in astronomy as a child along with other subjects like music and art. His precocious abilities made him write his first research papers on the theory of orbits of binary stars (celestial mechanics) at the very young age of sixteen. Those were published in Astronomische Nachrichten (astronomical notes) — the oldest astronomical journal, in 1890.
He completed his doctorate at the University of Munich for the work on the applications of Henri Poincaré’s theory of stable configurations of rotating bodies and tidal deformation of moons. He got a chance to work with some renowned physicists Felix Christian Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski while…
