Walther Mayer

Walter Mayer (1887-1948) was an Austrian mathematician, born 1887 in Graz, Austria.

Mayer, who was Jewish, studied at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and the University of Paris before receiving his doctorate in 1912 from the University of Vienna. After serving in the First World War, he lectured at the University of Vienna as Privatdozent (lecturer) with the title "Professor." He made a name for himself in topology (the Mayer–Vietoris sequence), and also worked in differential geometry, publishing the well-known textbook "Duschek-Mayer on Differential Geometry". In 1929, he became Albert Einstein's assistant with the explicit understanding that he work with him on distant parallelism.

From 1931 to 1936, he collaborated with Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity. In 1933, after Hitler's assumption of power, he followed Einstein to the United States and became an associate in mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He died in 1948.