Jacob Grommer
Russian mathematician
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Jacob Grommer (1879–1933) was a Belarusian mathematician.
Life
He was born in 1879 in Brest-Litovsk (then Russia, currently Brest, Belarus).[1] At a young age, he became interested in mathematics, and became a doctoral student under David Hilbert in Gottingen.[1]
After completing his doctoral thesis in 1914, for more than 10 years he served as an assistant of Albert Einstein, working with him in his (unsuccessful) attempts to build a unified field theory.[1]
As early as 1917, Einstein asked Paul Ehrenfest for help finding a place for Grommer, a “true Russian” in his words, in the USSR. Later Einstein facilitated Grommer’s contacts with Russian physicists to arrange his appointment as a professor of the Belarusian State University in Minsk in 1929. Shortly afterwards, Grommer was elected as a member of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences.[1]
He died peacefully in 1933. Starting from 1937, he was a non-person in the annals of the Belarusian Academy, and in Russia in general.[1]
Grommer made contributions to mathematical physics, complex analysis, and analytic number theory.[1]
Grommer suffered from acromegaly, giving him a deformed appearance that impeded his career.[2][3]