First Serbian works on Theory of Relativity

​Žarko Mijajlović​ , Nadežda Pejović​ , Viktor Radović​

Faculty of Mathematics, Univ. of Belgrade, Serbia


 Even if A. Michelson, H. Lorentz, H. Poincaré and others performed experiments and wrote papers to the
subject known later as the special theory of relativity more than two decades before Albert Einstein
published his paper on this topic in 1905, it is usually considered that special theory of relativity
originated in this year. This theory was soon accepted and many authors wrote papers on this matter. ​It is
not so well known that several Serbian mathematicians and astronomers also wrote papers on special
theory of relativity already in the twenties of XX century. Some of the papers were popular explanation of
basics of this theory and they were intended to the general public, but there were also papers with original
contributions. All papers were written in Serbian and certainly this is the main reason that these results
were neglected. We shall present works in this field of a great Serbian astronomer and climatologist
Milutin Milankovć (1879-1958), a great Serbian mathematician and the founder of the Serbian
mathematical school Mihailo Petrović Alas (1868-1943) and Sima Marković (1888-1939),
mathematician, philosopher and politician, also known as one of the founder of the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia.