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I'd be grateful if someone could point me in the right direction as to what's on the blackboard here. What am I looking at? I appreciate there's lots there but can anyone help? Particularly the 4 small boxes lower right. Apologies for wrong tag. Many thanks, Tom. einstein's blacboard

Tom Black
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    Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Oct 02 '22 at 11:26
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    I appreciate it's hard, but does anyone recognise any of the equations? Does anyone know what it's roughly about? – Tom Black Oct 02 '22 at 11:32
  • Welcome Tom. It would help quite a bit if you were to transcribe (as best you can) using LaTex so that we're not straining to read it. It would also then fit with accessibility policies for non-sighted readers. MathJax tutorial. – Jiminy Cricket. Oct 02 '22 at 11:48
  • Some context would help. Where and when was this blackboard photographed? – cms Oct 02 '22 at 11:54
  • Note that this is not the well known Einstein's Blackboard from May 1931 which is preserved in the Oxford Museum of Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Blackboard). Instead it is from photographs of Einstein's office at the Institute of Advanced Study taken after his death in 1955, and subsequently published in LIFE magazine. – gandalf61 Oct 02 '22 at 13:42
  • At a glance, this is about vierbein (tetrad) formulation of GR. $\lambda$'s are frame fields (usually denoted as $e^a_\mu$ now) while $\gamma$'s are spin connection ($\omega^{ab}_\mu$ in modern notation). The lower right boxes count the numbers of independent variables and equations for metric and tetrad formulations: 10 dof for the metric ($g$) plus 40 dof of the connection ($\Gamma$) for the “old” formulation are equivalent to 16 dof of the vierbein and 24 dof of the spin connection. Those are to be determined from 10 Einstein equations and 40 equations for connection to be Levi-Civita. – A.V.S. Oct 02 '22 at 14:19
  • Many thanks for your replies, gives me somethign to go off! Appreciated, Tom. – Tom Black Oct 02 '22 at 14:32
  • Put this in history of science and math stack exchange – Hisham Oct 02 '22 at 20:07

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