Markus Reiner

Markus Reiner was born in 1886 in Chernivtsi

Reiner was born on January 5, 1886, in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary. He studied civil engineering in Vienna from 1903 to 1909 and earned a doctorate.

He served as a lieutenant in the engineering corps of the Austrian Army in World War I. He worked as a railway engineer for the Austrian and later the Romanian government. He was active in the Zionist movement and was a delegate to the 12th Zionist Congress in 1921.

In 1922 he moved to the Land of Israel and was among the founders of Kibbutz Heftziba. He worked as an engineer in the Public Works Department of the Mandate government until 1947. During the 1929 riots he served as a special constable.

He later became a professor at the Technion in Haifa. With Eugene Bingham he coined the term rheology, the study of how materials flow and deform. He is known for the Deborah number, the teapot effect and equations that bear his name.

He married twice and had four children. He died on April 25, 1976, and was buried at Kibbutz Lahav.