John W. Miles

John Wilder Miles ( born December 1, 1920 in Cincinnati, † October 20, 2008 in Santa Barbara (California ) ) was an American engineer scientist who dealt with hydrodynamics.

Miles studied at Caltech with a bachelor 's degree in 1942, her Master's degree in 1943 and a PhD in electrical engineering in 1944. During World War II he worked at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT and 1944-45 at Lockheed Aircraft. In 1945 he became assistant professor and later professor at the University of California, Los Angeles ( as an engineer and in 1955 also of Geophysics ). From 1965 he was at the University of California, San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In 1951 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of New Zealand, 1952 Visiting Professor at the University of London, from 1962 to 1964 at the Australian National University and in 1969 as a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge.

1958/58 and 1968/69 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.

It deals with geophysical hydrodynamics, for example, interaction of wind with waves.

He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Geophysical Union.

In 1982 he received the Timoshenko Medal and 1983 the Otto Laporte Award.

In 1966, he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Writings

• On the generation of surface waves by shear flows, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 3, 1957, pp. 185-204, Part 2, Volume 16, 1963, pp. 209-227
• Harbor seiching, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 6, 1974, p 17-33
• On Hamilton's principle for surface waves, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 83, 1977, p 153-158
• Solitary waves, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 12, 1980, pp. 11-43
• With D. Henderson parametrically forced surface waves, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 22, 1990, pp. 143-165