Friedrich Kottler

Who was Friedrich Kottler?

Friedrich Kottler was an Austrian theoretical physicist. He was a Privatdozent before he got a professorship in 1923 at the University of Vienna.

In 1938, after the Anschluss, he lost his professorship due to his Jewish ancestry. With the help of Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, he immigrated to America from his hometown of Vienna, Austria, settling in Rochester, New York, where he worked at the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory.

Besides optics, Kottler's professional pursuits focused on the theory of relativity. In 1912, he presented a general covariant formulation of the electromagnetic equations, based on the absolute differential calculus, which is also valid within Albert Einstein's General Relativity, before that theory was even developed. In this connection, Kottler worked on the description of accelerations and rotations in relativity. In 1918, Kottler created his own interpretation of general relativity. In 1922, he published the article "Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie" in Band 6 of Klein's encyclopedia.

He died in Rochester, New York in 1965.