Luis Santaló and classical field theory

¹ Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa 3200003, Israel
² Physics Department, University of Buenos Aires and IFIBA-CONICET, Ciudad Universitaria, Pabellón 1, Buenos Aires 1428, Argentina
³ Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, ICTP, Strada Costiera 11, Trieste 34151, Italy

^a e-mail: giribet@gmail.com

Received: 2 August 2019
Received in final form: 17 September 2019
Published online: 25 October 2019

Abstract

Considered one of the founding fathers of integral geometry, Luis Santaló has contributed to various areas of mathematics. His work has applications in number theory, in the theory of differential equations, in stochastic geometry, in functional analysis, and also in theoretical physics. Between the 1950’s and the 1970’s, he wrote a series of papers on general relativity and on the attempts at generalizing Einstein’s theory to formulate a unified field theory. His main contribution in this subject was to provide a classification theorem for the plethora of tensors that were populating Einstein’s generalized theory. This paper revisits his work on theoretical physics.