Tilman Sauer

Tilman Sauer (born 1963) is a German theoretical physicist and historian of the natural sciences. He has an international reputation as an expert on the history of the development of general relativity theory.

Education and career At the Free University of Berlin, Sauer received in 1990 his Diplom in theoretical physics and in 1994 his doctorate (Promotion) in theoretical physics. His doctoral dissertation is entitled Development and Application of Refined Path Monte Carlo Methods. From 1991 to 1996 he was employed as a research scholar at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In 1996 from March to December he worked at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. From 1997 to 1999 he worked for the project Hilbert-Edition at the University of Göttingen's Institute for the History of Science. From 1999 to 2001 he was an assistant professor (Hochschulassistent) at the University of Bern's Institute for the History of Science, where he eventually completed his habilitation in the history of science in 2008. From December 2008 to September 2015 he was a Privatdozent at the University of Bern. Sauer has held various academic appointments in the history department at Caltech since 2001. For the academic year 2010–2011 at the University of Bern, he held an interim chair (Lehrstuhlvertretung) for the history and philosophy of science. At the University of Mainz, he has been, since 2015, a professor for the history of mathematics and natural sciences.

Einstein seems to have delayed until 1936 publishing an important idea he had in 1912. Renn and Sauer explicated the role that Rudi W. Mandl played in urging Einstein to publish on gravitational lensing.

Sauer also researched David Hilbert's contributions to the early history of GR and the Hilbert-Einstein priority dispute and Hilbert's program on the foundations of physics. The priority dispute is, among other things, about the question of what is written on a missing page of a page proof of Hilbert's paper — Sauer is of the opinion that the complete Einstein field equations were not found by Hilbert.

Sauer's research also includes, among other topics, the history of Richard Feynman's research and the development of the theory of path integrals.

In 2016 Sauer gave the historical lecture „Ich bewundere die Eleganz Ihrer Rechnungsweise“ - Einstein und die Mathematik (I admire the elegance of your calculations — Einstein and mathematics), which was part of the events accompanying the Euler Lecture.

Selected publications Articles

Einsteins Züricher Notizbuch, Preprint MPI Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin

Book chapters

Chapter. Heuristics and Mathematical Representation in Einstein's Search for a Gravitational Field Equation by Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer, pages 87–126

Chapter. Errors and insights: reconstructing the genesis of general relativity from Einstein's Zürich notebook by Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer, pages 253–268

Book Chapter. Albert Einstein's 1916 Review Article on General Relativity by Tilman Sauer, pages 802–822. arXiv preprint table of contents Chapter. Einstein's Zürich Notebook. Introduction and Source. Introduction to Volumes 1 and 2: The Zurich Notebook and the Genesis of General Relativity by Michel Janssen, John D. Norton, Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, and John Stachel, pages 7–20 Chapter. Pathways Out of Classical Physics: Einstein's Double Strategy in his Search for the Gravitational Field Equation by Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer, pages 113–312 table of contents Chapter. A Commentary on the Notes on Gravity in the Zurich Notebook by Michel Janssen, Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, John D. Norton, and John Stachel, pages 489–714 Books