Alexander Friedmann Biography

This Alexander Friedmann biography concentrates on his main intellectual achievements.

Alexander Friedmann biography, essentials: born St Petersburg, 1888, produced the first model of an expanding universe, died 1925.

Alexander Friedmann, as a teenager, showed his forward-thinking and rebellious nature by leading school strikes against the repressive Tsar Nicholas II. But when he entered the University of St Petersburg in 1906 he directed his attention to mathematics rather than politics.

Friedmann's early research career was dominated by the first world war. He volunteered for bombing missions and used his his mathematical ability to improve the problem of dropping bombs with greater accuracy. After enduring the war and the 1917 Russian revolution, Friedmann returned to academia and applied Einstein's general theory of relativity to cosmology.

Alexander Friedmann ignored Albert Einstein's cosmological constant to see what cosmology would emerge from general relativity in its simplest form. In Friedmann's model of cosmology the universe expands, which means the cosmological constant was not needed to offset a universal collapse.

Friedmann presented his ideas in a paper of 1922. Einstein eventually accepted that Friedmann's model was mathematically valid, but did not accept its physical validity. Friedmann continued to promote his model, but in 1925 he contracted typhoid fever and died.

Big Bang by Simon Singh contains more biographical detail on Alexander Friedmann.