EPP Heralds Release of Two New Books
Our esteemed colleague: A. J. Kox, Senior Editor at the Einstein Papers Project, Visiting Associate in History at Caltech and Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam, has released his latest book with Springer The Scientific Correspondence of H.A. Lorentz. Volume 2, the Dutch Correspondents. A historian of modern physics, Professor Kox is a veteran member of our project, having started his work on The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in 1985.
This is the second and final volume of Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz's scientific correspondence with Dutch colleagues, including Pieter Zeeman and Paul Ehrenfest. The 294 letters cover multiple subjects, ranging from pure mathematics to magneto-optics and wave mechanics. They reveal much about their author, including Lorentz's surprisingly active involvement in experimental matters in the first decades of his career.
Dr. Judith Goodstein, historian of science, Caltech's first archivist and a treasured colleague of the EPP, has released her latest book, published by the American Mathematical Society: Einstein's Italian Mathematicians: Ricci, Levi-Civita, and the Birth of General Relativity.
The book chronicles the lives and intellectual contributions of Ricci and his brilliant student Tullio Levi-Civita, including letters, interviews, memoranda, and other personal and professional papers, to tell the remarkable, little-known story of how two Italian academicians, of widely divergent backgrounds and temperaments, came to provide the indispensable mathematical foundation—today known as the tensor calculus—for general relativity.