Wolfgang Rindler (1924–2019)

Wolfgang Rindler was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. His parents were Margarete (Kopecki) and Dr. Ernst Rindler. In 1938, they sent 14-year-old Wolfgang on a Kindertransport to the UK for safety from Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. He attended the University of Liverpool, earning B.Sc. degrees in mathematics and physics, and an M.Sc. in mathematics. He then went on to Imperial College London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics (relativity) in 1956. He became one of the most prominent experts in theoretical relativistic cosmology and general relativity. From 1956 to 1963, he taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1963 to become associate professor at the newly-founded Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, a private research organization. In 1969, this became the University of Texas at Dallas, with Prof. Rindler as one of the founding faculty members. He was based at UTD for the remainder of his career, eventually becoming professor emeritus. He was a visiting professor at King's College London, at the Sapienza Università in Rome, the Max-Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, Cambridge University in the UK, and the University of Vienna. In 1960, Prof. Rindler published the first of his seven acclaimed textbooks, Special Relativity. Others included Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (1969), Introduction to Special Relativity (1982), and the two-volume Spinors and Space-Time (with Roger Penrose, 1984).