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Alfred Arthur Robb FRS (18 January 1873 in Belfast – 14 December 1936 in Castlereagh) was an Irish physicist. Alfred Robb at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
He is known for his four books on special relativity (1911, 1914, 1921, 1936) where he gave a spacetime derivation of the theory in an axiomatic-geometric way.A. J. Briginshaw (1979) "The axiomatic geometry of Space-Time: An assessment of the work of A. A. Robb", Centaurus 22: 315–323 Robb therefore was sometimes called the "Euclid of relativity". In the first of these works he used a hyperbolic angle ω to introduce the concept of rapidityRobb (1911) Optical Geometry of Motion and showed that the kinematic space of velocities is hyperbolic, so that "instead of a Euclidean triangle of velocities, we get a Lobachevski triangle of rapidities".
However, contrary to the scientific mainstream, he believed that the works of Joseph Larmor and Hendrik Lorentz were more important for relativity than the works of Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski.Sanchez-Ron, pp. 46-49
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Categories: 1873 Births, 1936 Deaths, Scientists From Belfast, Fellows Of The Royal Society, Irish Relativity Theorists, 19th-century Irish Physicists, 20th-century Physicists From Northern Ireland, Alumni Of Queen's University Belfast, Alumni Of St John's College, Cambridge, University Of Göttingen Alumni
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