Theodor Kaluza

Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza was a German mathematician and physicist, born in 1885 in Wilhelmsthal, now part of Opole, known for the Kaluza-Klein theory, which involves field equations in five-dimensional space-time. He spent his youth in Königsberg, studied mathematics at its university and gained a doctorate with a thesis on Tschirnhaus transformations. In April 1919 he noticed that solving Einstein's equations of general relativity in five dimensions produced Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism spontaneously, and Einstein supported the publication of the idea in 1921. His proposal that the fundamental forces can be unified by additional dimensions was reused much later in string theory. He became a professor at Kiel in 1929 and a full professor at Göttingen in 1935.