Marcel Grossmann attended school in Basel then studied mathematics at Zurich. In 1900 he became an assistant to the geometer W Fiedler in Zurich.
Grossmann obtained his doctorate from Zurich in 1912, then became a teacher in a school in Frauenfeld, northern Switzerland, in 1901 and in Basel in 1905. He became professor of descriptive geometry at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich in 1907.
Grossmann was a classmate of Einstein. Einstein turned to him for help with the mathematical formulation of the theory of general relativity. Grossmann discovered the relevance of the tensor calculus of Christoffel, Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita to relativity.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
December 1996