FOM: Einstein

[Vaughan Pratt]

From: Robert Black <Robert.Black at nottingham.ac.uk>
>I suspect that the key person in this development is not Gauss, Bolyai or
>Lobachevsky but rather (for all sorts of reasons) Riemann.

Quite right, I should have perhaps have included Riemann in the chain
that led up to relativity.  But if Einstein had started from Riemann
rather than Ricci and Levi-Civita, now *that* would have been *utterly*
spectacular.  While Riemann is the undisputed father of manifolds,
the field had matured greatly in the intervening half-century by the
time Einstein became its most famous customer, and R&LC are the natural
jumping-off point for Einstein's development.

Vaughan Pratt