Markus Reiner

Markus Reiner (Hebrew: מרכוס ריינר‎, born 5 January 1886, died 25 April 1976) was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology.

Biography

Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna (Vienna University of Technology). After the First World War, he emigrated to Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa. In his honour the Technion later instituted the Markus Reiner Chair in Mechanics and Rheology.

Research

Reiner was not only a major figure in rheology, he along with Eugene C. Bingham coined the term and founded a society for its study. As well as the term rheology, and his publications, he is known for the Buckingham-Reiner Equation, the Reiner-Riwlin Equation, and Reiner-Rivlin fluids, the Deborah number and the Teapot effect – an explanation of why tea runs down the outside of the spout of a teapot instead of into the cup.