Chaim L. Pekeris

Chaim body Pekeris ( born June 15, 1908 in Alytus, Lithuania, † February 24, 1993 in Rehovot ) was an Israeli physicist and applied mathematician who dealt in particular with geophysics and nuclear physics.

Life

Pekeris came in 1925 with his two brothers in the U.S. (made possible by an uncle who has already been successful in the furniture industry there) where he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a bachelor 's degree in meteorology in 1929 and his doctorate in 1933 in geophysics at Carl -Gustaf Rossby (The development and present status of the theory of heat balance in the atmosphere ). During this time he was also a study in Oslo. After that, he was instructor at MIT and turned to geophysics to under Louis B. Slichter. In 1938 he became a U.S. citizen. He remained at MIT until 1941, when he moved to the Hudson Laboratories of Columbia University for the purpose of military research. In 1946 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study and was Guggenheim Fellow. At the same time he was active in the procurement of military equipment for the nascent State of Israel. In 1948, he went to Israel, where he since 1949 at the Weizmann Institute was founded and its Department of Applied Mathematics and managed. He was involved in the development of the first digital computer in Israel, the WEIZAC and led the first geophysical survey of Israel, which also led to the discovery of oil at Heletz. In 1973, he went into retirement. He died as a result of a fall from the stairs of his house.

During his time at MIT in the 1930s, he dealt with mantle convection, which came as a mechanism for plate tectonics in question, with natural oscillations of the atmosphere and of stars, propagation of sound pulses and the inverse problem of electrical conductivity in rocks. His work on pulse propagation he sat in the Second World War continued in military research on sonar, which later earned him the title of Honorary Admiral of the U.S. Navy. After the war he worked on atomic physics and theoretical seismology and hydrodynamics. For example, he led the critical Reynolds number ( onset of turbulence) for flow from a circular pipe. In atomic physics, he published fundamental work on the calculation of the ground state of helium, which was based on a variational method Egil Hylleraas. He examined theoretically the natural vibration modes of the Earth, which could be verified in 1960 after the great earthquake in Chile and developed synthetic seismograms for layered media, calculated using the Weizac and Golem computers in Israel. Computer calculations he performed in his study of atomic physics and the numerical simulation of tides.

In 1974 he received the Vetlesen Prize and in 1980 the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences ( 1952). In 1981 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Physics. He became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1972.

Writings

  • Thermal convection in the interior of the Earth, Mon Not. R. Astron. Soc. Geophys. Suppl 3, 1935, pp. 343-367
  • Inverse Boundary Problem in Seismology, Physics, Volume 5, 1934, pp. 307-316
  • Atmospheric Oscillations, Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 158, 1937, pp. 650-671 ( and Nature, vol 138, 1936, p 642)
  • Non -radial oscillations of stars, Astrophys. J., Vol 88, 1938, p.189 -199
  • The propagation of an SH pulse in a layered medium, Transactions American Geophysical Union I, Report Papers, 1941, p 392
  • Stability of laminar flow through a straight pipe of circular cross section to infinitesimal disturbances Which are symmetrical about the axis of the pipe, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., Volume 34, 1948, p.285 -295
  • Theory of propagation of explosive sound in shallow water, Geol Soc. Am. Memoir 27, 1948
  • The zero-point energy of helium, Phys. Rev., Vol 79, 1950, pp. 884-885
  • The seismic surface pulse, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., Volume 41, 1955, pp. 469-480
  • With IM Longman Ray theory solution of the problem- of propagation of explosive sound in a layered liquid, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Volume 31 1958, p 323-328.
  • Ground state of two- electron atom, Phys. Rev., Volume 112, 1958, S.1649 -1658
  • With Z. Alterman, H. Jarosch Oscillations of the Earth, Proc. R. Soc. A, Volume 252, 1959, pp. 80-95.
  • 1 1S and 23S states of helium, Phys. Rev., Volume 115, 1959, S.1216 -1221
  • 1 1S, 2 1S, and 2 3S states of H { - } and of He, Phys. Rev., Volume 126, 1962, pp. 1470-1476
  • With Y. Accad Dynamics of the liquid core of the Earth, Philos. Trans Royal Soc. A, Volume 273, 1972, p 237-260
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