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( Howard Percy Robertson)
Howard Percy Robertson (January 27, 1903 – August 26, 1961) was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[1] Robertson was born in Hoquiam, Washington and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1922 and a master’s in mathematics and physics in 1923 from the University of Washington in Seattle. He completed his PhD at Caltech in mathematics and physics in 1925 under Harry Bateman, with the dissertation, “On Dynamical Space-Times Which Contain a Conformal Euclidean 3-Space”. [2] Upon receipt of his doctorate, Robertson received a National Research Council Fellowship to study at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, and Princeton University. At Munich, he was a postdoctoral student of Arnold Sommerfeld.[3] One of Robertson's first landmark papers, a brief note in The Annals of Mathematics, series II, Vol 39, pp 101-104 (1938) entitled "Note on the preceding paper The two body problem in general relativity" solved that problem within a degree of approximation not improved on for several decades. Earlier work, such as the Schwarzschild metric, were for a central body that did not move, while Robertson's solution considered two bodies orbiting each other. Nevertheless, his solution failed to include gravitational radiation, so the bodies orbit forever, rather than approaching each other.
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