Mathwar/Personlist/Lanczos Cornelius
Cornelius Lanczos
(* February 2nd 1893 Hungrary, † June 25th 1974)
Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destinationCornelius Lanczos
Life
Lanczos' Ph.D. thesis (1921) was on relativity theory. In 1924 he discovered an exact solution of the Einstein field equation which represents a cylindrically symmetric rigidly rotating configuration of dust particles. This was later rediscovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum and is known today as the van Stockum dust. It is one of the simplest known exact solutions in general relativity and regarded as an important example, in part because it exhibits closed timelike curves. Lanczos served as assistant to Albert Einstein during the period 1928–29.
He did pioneering work along with G.C. Danielson on what is now called the fast Fourier transform (1940), but the significance of his discovery was not appreciated at the time and today the FFT is credited to Cooley and Tukey (1965). (As a matter of fact, similar claims can be made for several other mathematicians; some even name Carl Friedrich Gauss as a progenitor of the FFT.)