Assignment 5 - Discoverer of Expanding Universe

Alexander Friedmann was a mathematician and cosmologist born in Saint Petersburg, Russia on June 16, 1888. His father and mother were both working in fields that were not related to the sciences (ballet dancer and a pianist, respectively). Friedmann attended Saint Petersburg State University from 1906-1910, where he studied mathematics. He then got his master’s degree in pure and applied mathematics in 1914, while his research focused on aeronautics, the magnetic field of the earth, the mechanics of liquids and theoretical meterology. Friedmann took many flights in airships to make meterological observations, although when the First World War started he volunteered as a technical expert and bomber pilot for the Russian Air Force. He taught pilots on aerodynamics in 1915, and a year after he became the head of the Central Aeronautical Station in Kiev, then Moscow. When the station disbanded due to the Russian Revolution of 1917, he became a professor of theoretical mechanics at Perm University.

Friedmann returned to his hometown in 1920 after life was getting too difficult in Perm due to the civil war. By the late 1920s, he had become aware with Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. As a result, in 1922 Friedmann discovered the expanding universe solution to Einstein’s general relativity field equations. Einstein first rejected these solutions, then later acknowledged them to be correct. The expansion of the universe was then supported in 1929 by Edwin Hubble’s observations. Friedmann depicted three models in his papers: positive, zero, and negative curvature of space-time. These models helped to establish the standard for the Big Bang and steady state theories of the universe. In 1923 and 1924, he traveled through Europe discussing his research with other scientists and he was later given the job as the director of the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. Throughout this period, he had a student, George Gamow, who briefly studied under him. Sadly, Friedmann died at the young age of 37 from what is believed to be from typhoid fever.

References:
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_friedmann.html
http://www.decodedscience.com/alexander-friedmann-unsung-hero-of-modern-cosmology/19423