About the Author

I became interested in Einstein’s theory of relativity when I first read Stephan Hawking’s popular book "A Brief history of Time". I then started to 'devour' every popular book on relativity and cosmology that I could lay my hands on.

Like most engineers, I wanted to put what I read into rather simple mathematics. This is the engineering way to really understand any technical subject. I obviously ran into difficulties because relativity is not an easy subject.

While discussing it with a colleague, he mentioned a good introductory technical book on relativity: "Differential Geometry and Relativity Theory" by Richard Faber. He did mention that he had to take a course on differential geometry in order to follow the book…

I got hold of the book and started to study it. It was painful working through the math, but after that the relativity part was a real pleasure! If only one could put into a more "engineering-like" math…

Well, about 10 years later I succeeded in that quest to some degree. A good portion of the formidable general relativity is cast into language and math that engineers should be reasonably comfortable with. This website is the result. To what degree did I succeed? You be the judge.

Acknowledgments to colleague Andre Smit, who pointed me in the right relativistic direction, my son Coburt Jordaan for his advice on setting up a website, Sitesell for their excellent tools in website building and lastly everyone who commented and/or proofread parts of this project.