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Thursday, December 9, 2010 - 6:00pm

Paul Wolfson

West Chester University

Location

Villanova University

103 Mendel Hall

Light supper available at 6 p.m. for $10 (optional)

Almost immediately after Einstein published his first paper on relativity in 1905, others reworked some of his arguments in a more geometrical language. Minkowski´s was, of course, the broadest and most successful effort, but beginning in 1909, Sommerfeld and Varicak developed a geometric representation of relativistic velocities. In this talk I shall discuss these developments and explain the setting in which Felix Klein unified them.