Wolfgang Rindler

Wolfgang Rindler was a physicist working in the field of General Relativity. He is known for introducing the term "event horizon," Rindler coordinates, and (in collaboration with Roger Penrose) for popularizing the use of spinors in general relativity. An honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Accademia Delle Scienze di Torino, he was also a prolific textbook author. Wolfgang Rindler was the son of a lawyer. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he fled before the Nazis to England in the course of the so-called Kindertransport in 1938. Rindler gained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Liverpool and his Ph.D. from Imperial College London. In 1956 he was at Cornell University.

In 1960 Oliver & Boyd and InterScience published his first book on special relativity. Reviewer Alfred Schild said it was an "excellent, clear, and concise account" and "provided a sound balance between physical ideas, analytical formulae, and space-time geometry." In 1961 Rindler used the Fitzgerald contraction as the premise of his article "Length contraction paradox." The thought experiment is now called the ladder paradox. Starting in 1963, he began teaching at the newly-founded Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, later called the University of Texas at Dallas, where he was professor emeritus. He was visiting scholar at King's College London and at the University La Sapienza in Rome.

In 1969 Springer published the first edition of his Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological. The undergraduate textbook was lauded as a "refreshingly modern approach to the critical problem of teaching relativity theory." Another reviewer said it is "simply the best introduction" and is "filled with fabulous insights." When the second edition appeared in 1977, a reviewer noted its treatment "reminiscent of Mach's celebrated examination of the foundations of classical mechanics." On the other hand, the second edition "gives the barest hints of new developments." Later, another reviewer criticized it for the paucity of diagrams but lauded the chapter on cosmology as "lyrical, philosophical, yet technical."

Rindler was visiting scholar at the University of Vienna (1975, 1987) and at Cambridge University. In 1982 Oxford University Press published Introduction to Special Relativity, with the second edition in 1991. A reviewer noted that other books provide a better introduction and intuitive understanding but that they "should provide a useful reference for most applications of special relativity: kinematics, optics, particle mechanics, electromagnetism and mechanics of continua." In 1984 Roger Penrose and Rindler published Spinors and Spacetime, volume 1, on "two-spinor calculus and relativistic fields." Michał Heller wrote that Spinors and Spacetime "are both elementary and highly advanced. It begins on an almost graduate level but soon, step by step, reaches the highest standards of modern mathematical physics."

In 2001 Oxford University Press published Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological, with a second edition in 2006. A reviewer noted, "His writing is elegant, yet compact and logically precise." He was impressed with the "discussion of the internal structure of black holes analyzed first in Schwarzschild coordinates, and then in a masterful treatment of the Kruskal extension." Wolfgang Rindler died at the age of 94 on 8 February 2019.