Jørg Tofte Jebsen

Jørg Tofte Jebsen (27 April 1888 – 7 January 1922) was a physicist from Norway, where he was the first to work on Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In this connection he became known after his early death for what many now call the Jebsen-Birkhoff theorem for the metric tensor outside a general, spherical mass distribution.

He was meant to enter his father's company and spent for that purpose two years in Aachen in Germany where he studied textile manufacturing.

His work there was interrupted in the period 1911-12 when he was an assistant for Sem Sæland at the newly established Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim.

They had then moved back to his parents home in Berger where he worked alone on a larger treatise with the title Versuch einer elektrodynamischen Systematik.

At that time it was natural to study the exact solution of Einstein’s equations for the metric outside a static, spherical mass distribution found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916.

After a relative short time he came to the surprising result that the static Schwarzschild solution still gives the exact metric tensor outside the mass distribution.

This was met by some difficulties, but after the intervention by Oseen it was accepted for publication in a Swedish journal for the natural sciences where it appeared the following year.

[9] In the fall the same year Jebsen traveled with his family to Bolzano in northern Italy in order to find a milder climate to improve his deteriorating health.