About Mathisson:

Myron Mathisson (1897-1940) was a Polish Jew, born and educated in Warsaw (Ph. D. under C. Białobrzeski in 1931). In 1929 he wrote, in French, a letter to Einstein, criticizing, in rather strong words, Einstein's approach to equations of motion in general relativity and outlining his own ideas on the subject. Einstein answered by inviting Mathisson to Berlin. Mathisson declined the invitation on the ground that he was not yet prepared to collaborate with Einstein; in the following years Einstein and Mathisson exchanged about 20 letters that are accessible at the Einstein Archive. On several occasions, Einstein supported Mathisson to obtain fellowships to pay scientific visits abroad.

In a series of six papers, Mathisson outlined a new method of deriving equations of motion of bodies in general relativity. He associated with such bodies a distribution (`gravitational skeleton') with support on a time-like world-line, representing the motion of their center of mass. In particular, he showed that for a body with an intrinsic angular momentum (spin), this world-line is no more a geodesic: Mathisson discovered (1937) a new interaction between spin and Riemannian curvature; the resulting equation is now associated with the names of Mathisson and Papapetrou (1951). Mathisson's papers contained the first, explicit use of the geometry of null (optical) elements to describe fields in relativity. He gave a new derivation of the equation of motion of a radiating electron.

For several years after the doctorate, Mathisson was a `Privat-Dozent' at Warsaw University, but, in spite of Einstein's support, he never obtained a permanent academic position in Poland. His visits to Paris (1935 and 1939) and a collaboration with Jacques Hadamard was particularly fruitful. Mathisson developed a new method to analyze the properties of the fundamental solution of linear hyperbolic differential equations and used it to resolve Hadamard's conjecture on the class of equations for which the Huygens principle in four space-time dimensions is valid. Mathisson's work and the paper of 1939 published in Acta Mathematica, vol. 71, so impressed Hadamard that, after Mathisson's death, he dedicated to him his paper on The Problem of the Diffusion of Waves, Ann. Math. 42, (1942) 510-522.

Mathisson spent the academic year 1936-37 lecturing at the University of Kazan. From the fall of 1937 to the spring of 1939 he lived in Cracow and collaborated there with Jan Weyssenhoff. Mathisson's ideas were further developed, during and after World War II, by Weyssenhoff and his students. In the spring of 1939 Mathisson went to Cambridge and continued there work on the problem of motion. He impressed the physicists there so that, when he died in 1940, Dirac edited and presented for publication the notes left by Mathisson; he also wrote Mathisson's obituary notice that appeared in Nature.

The web page http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Mathisson.html contains Mathisson's curriculum vitae and a list of his publications.