Wolfgang Rindler (right) was a mathematician and physicist who taught at multiple universities, including Liverpool University and Cornell University, before teaching physics at UTD. Photo courtesy of UTD Communications.
Holocaust survivor, retired physics professor who taught at university for 66 years passes away at age 94
Wolfgang Rindler, a professor emeritus of physics and one
of the founding faculty members at UTD, passed away earlier this month on Feb.
8. He was 94.
Rindler
was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924 and fled to England from the Nazis in 1938
because of his Jewish ancestry. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees
in mathematics at the University of Liverpool before receiving his doctorate in
mathematics with a focus on relativity from Imperial College London. He began
teaching as a graduate student at the University of Liverpool in 1947 and
continued teaching until his retirement. He taught at Cornell University during
1956 before coming to Dallas in 1963.
Rindler
gained recognition for coining the term “event horizon,” a key idea of general
relativity that space and time are not separate concepts but are unified in
four-dimensional space-time.
Physics
professor Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki worked with Rindler as a part of UTD’s
Cosmology, Relativity and Astrophysics research group.
“He was a very kind man and a very good friend,”
Ishak-Boushaki said. “Of course, he was older than anyone I was working with,
but he respects the ideas of others and keeps his own ideas as well.”
Both
professors collaborated on four papers from 2007 to 2010, which focused on
misconceptions regarding papers published in the early 1980s about how the
cosmological constant does not affect the deflection of light by a massive
object. They discovered the constant does indeed affect the deflection of light.
“He
would always find a way to make a nice comment or observation. He would listen
very well and encourage other ideas, but again, if he knew he was right on
something, he would try to explain it,” Ishak-Boushaki said. “He had a very
collegiate way of working and was very humble.”
Michael
Kesden, an assistant professor of physics, also collaborated with Rindler on
several occasions.
“It’s just amazing, trying to encapsulate his career. He
had a passion for a lot of different things, but he was mostly a mathematician
and mostly understood the mathematical foundations of relativity,” Kesden said.
“I think
he will always be recognized as one of the founders of this university from an
academic perspective. He will be seen as an inspiration to current and future
students.”
In 1963,
UTD was a private research organization known as the Graduate Research Center
of the Southwest. One of Rindler’s friends, Ivor Robinson, the head of the
Division of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics and another founding member of
the research center, offered Rindler a position teaching mathematics,
relativity theory and cosmology. In 1969, when the center became what is now
UTD, he published his first undergraduate textbook, “Essential Relativity:
Special, General, and Cosmological.” In 1984, he co-wrote and published the
first volume of “Spinors and Spacetime,” and in 2001, “Relativity: Special,
General, and Cosmological.” Other than textbooks, Rindler also published
multiple papers in The American Journal of Physics.
Rinder taught UTD students for 66 years before retiring
in 2013. He is survived by his wife, Linda, his daughter, Cynthia and his two
sons, Eric and Mitchell.