Roland Weitzenböck

Roland Weitzenböck (1885 to 1955) was an Austrian mathematician who worked on differential geometry and the theory of invariants, and who gave his name to the Weitzenböck connection. Born in Kremsmünster, he took his degree at the University of Vienna in 1910, was a professor at Graz and then at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague, and from 1923 until 1945 held the chair of mathematics at the University of Amsterdam, appointed at the initiative of Brouwer. His 1923 monograph on invariant theory on manifolds included tensor calculus, and he also published on torsion and on teleparallelism in Einstein's theory. His doctoral students included G. F. C. Griss, Daniel Rutherford and the chess champion Max Euwe. His membership of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands led the Royal Netherlands Academy to suspend his membership in 1945.