J. L. Synge

John Lighton Synge FRSC FRS was an Irish mathematician and theoretical physicist whose long career included significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the USA. He was a prolific author and influential mentor, and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity. During his long scientific career, Synge published over 200 papers and 11 books. He proved the result now known as Synge's theorem, which concerns the topology of closed orientable Riemannian manifold of positive sectional curvature.

Synge was born in Dublin, Ireland, into a prominent Church of Ireland family (his uncle, John Millington Synge, was a famous playwright). He attended St. Andrew's College, Dublin, and in 1915 entered Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1919 he was awarded a B.A. in Mathematics and Experimental Physics. In 1922 he was awarded an M.A., and in 1926 a Sc.D. Synge was appointed to the position of lecturer at Trinity College, and then accepted a position at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1920. From 1920-1925, Synge was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

Synge returned to Trinity College Dublin, in 1925, where he was elected to a fellowship and was appointed the University Professor of Natural Philosophy (the old name for physics). He went back to Toronto in 1930, where he was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and became Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics. He spent some of 1939 at Princeton University, and in 1941, he was a visiting professor at Brown University. In 1943 he was appointed as Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Ohio State University. Three years later he became Head of the Mathematics Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where John Nash was one of his students. He spent a short time as a ballistic mathematician in the US Air Force between 1944 and 1945. He returned to Ireland in 1948, accepting the position of Senior Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He retired in 1972.

Source: Wikipedia