Walther Mayer (1887-1948). Studied mathematics at the
Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and at the University of
Vienna where he wrote his dissertation and became a Privatdozent
(lecturer) with the title “professor”. He had made himself a name
in topology (“Mayer-Vietoris sequences”), and worked also in
differential geometry (well-known textbook “Duschek-Mayer” on
differential geometry). In 1929 he became Einstein’s assistant with
the explicit understanding that he work with him on distant
parallelism. It seems that Mayer was appreciated much by Einstein
and, despite being in his forties, did accept this role as a
collaborator of Einstein. After coming to Princeton with Einstein
in 1933, he got a position at the Mathematical Institute of
Princeton University and became an associate of the Institute for
Advanced Study. Wrote a joint paper with T. Thomas on “Field
of parallel vectors in nonanalytic manifolds in the large.” Mayer
died in 1948.