Abraham Haskel Taub
Encyclopedia
Abraham Haskel Taub was a distinguished American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 mathematician and physicist, well known for his important contributions to the early development of general relativity
General relativity
General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...

, as well as differential geometry and differential equation
Differential equation
A differential equation is a mathematical equation for an unknown function of one or several variables that relates the values of the function itself and its derivatives of various orders...

s. He is perhaps best known for a 1948 paper dealing with relativistic shock waves, in which he introduced a relativistic generalization of the Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions across a shock
Shock wave
A shock wave is a type of propagating disturbance. Like an ordinary wave, it carries energy and can propagate through a medium or in some cases in the absence of a material medium, through a field such as the electromagnetic field...

, which is now known as the "Taub Adiabat."

Taub earned his doctorate at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1935, under the direction of the prominent relativist Howard Percy Robertson
Howard Percy Robertson
Howard Percy Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle...

. At Princeton, Taub was also influenced by Oswald Veblen
Oswald Veblen
Oswald Veblen was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905.-Life:...

.

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