John Lighton Synge - Career in Mathematics and Physics

Career in Mathematics and Physics

Synge was appointed to the position of lecturer at Trinity College, and then accepted a position at the University of Toronto in 1920. From 1920 until 1925, Synge was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. There he attended lectures by Ludwik Silberstein on the Theory of relativity, stimulating him to contribute "A system of space-time co-ordinates", a letter in Nature in 1921.

Synge returned to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1925, where he was elected to a fellowship and was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy (the old name for Physics). He was a member of the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society. He was treasurer of the Royal Irish Academy in 1929. He went back to Toronto in 1930. 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, 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. This school had been set up in 1940, and had several outstanding members, including Erwin Schrödinger (who contributed to quantum mechanics), who was also a Senior Professor.