page_title: Gunnar Nordström
section_title: Education and career
hierarchical_section_title: Gunnar Nordström / Education and career
caption_attribution_description: Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordström in 1900 (left) in middle Gunnar's brother Åke Nordström and in right Gunnar's school friend
context_page_description: Gunnar Nordström was a Finnish theoretical physicist best remembered for his theory of gravitation, which was an early competitor of general relativity. Nordström is often designated by modern writers as The Einstein of Finland due to his novel work in similar fields with similar methods to Einstein.
context_section_description: Nordström graduated high-school from Brobergska Skolan in central Helsinki 1899. At first he went on to study mechanical engineering, graduating in 1903 from the Polytechnic institute in Helsinki, later renamed Helsinki University of Technology and today a part of the Aalto University. During his studies he developed an interest for more theoretical subjects, proceeding after graduation to further study for a master's degree in natural science, mathematics and economy at the University of Helsinki (1903–1907).
  Nordström then moved to Göttingen, Germany, where he had been recommended to go to study physical chemistry. However, he soon lost interest in the intended field and moved to study electrodynamics, a field the University of Göttingen was renowned for at the time. He returned to Finland to complete his doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki in 1910, and become a docent at the university. Subsequently, he became fascinated with the very novel and soon burgeoning field of gravitation and wanted to move to the Netherlands where scientists with contributions to that fields such as Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest and Willem de Sitter were active. Nordström was able to move to Leiden in 1916 to work under Ehrenfest, in the midst of the First World War, due to his Russian passport. Nordström spent considerable time in Leiden where he met a Dutch physics student, Cornelia van Leeuwen, with whom he went on to have several children. After the war he declined a professorship at the University of Berlin, a post awarded instead to Max Born, in order to return to Finland in 1918 and hold at first the professorship of physics and later the professorship of mechanics at the Helsinki University of Technology.
  One of the keys to Nordström's success as a scientist was his ability to learn to apply differential geometry to physics, a new approach that also would eventually lead Albert Einstein to the theory of general relativity. Few other scientists of the time in the world were able to make effective use of this new analytical tool, with the notable exception of Ernst Lindelöf.
caption: Picture taken in 1900 of three high school graduates, Gunnar Nordström on the left.
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