Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman

From Freepedia

Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman or Friedmann (Александр Александрович Фридман) (June 16 1888 – September 16 1925) was a Russian cosmologist and mathematician. He discovered the expanding-universe solution to general relativity field equations in 1922, which was proved by Edwin Hubble's observations in 1929. Friedmann's 1924 papers, including "Uber die Moglichkeit einer Welt mit konstanter negativer Krummung des Raumes" (About the possibility of a world with constant negative curvature) published by the Brussels Academy of Sciences on the 7 January 1924, demonstrated that he had command of all three Friedmann models describing positive, zero and negative curvature respectively, a decade before Robertson and Walker published their analysis.

Alexander Friedmann lived much of his life in Leningrad. He fought in World War I (on behalf of Russia) as a bomber. Friedmann later lived through the thick of the russian revolution. Friedmann died young at age 37 due to typhoid fever. He also taught the other famous physicist George Gamow.