Marcel Grossmann

Marcel Grossmann was a Swiss mathematician who was a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein, born in 1878 to a Jewish family in Budapest and coming from an old Swiss family of Zürich. He became a professor of mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry. After graduating from the Polytechnic in 1900 he became an assistant to the geometer Wilhelm Fiedler, continued research on non-Euclidean geometry, and in 1902 earned his doctorate at the University of Zurich with a thesis on the metrical properties of collinear structures, with Fiedler as his advisor. In 1907 he was appointed full professor of descriptive geometry.