Diederik Korteweg

Diederik Johannes Korteweg ( born March 31, 1848 in Hertogenbosch, † May 10, 1941 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch applied mathematician.

Korteweg went in Hertogenbosch to school (his father was a judge ) and studied to be an engineer at the Polytechnic in Delft, but then moved on to train as a teacher of mathematics. He taught in Tilburg and Breda mathematics before 1876 to study at the University of Utrecht and the University of Amsterdam continued from where it was in 1878 his doctorate under John Diderik van der Waals. In his dissertation managed Korteweg first time, set up the equation for the motion of a pressure pulse in an elastic tube correctly. Korteweg was from 1881 to 1918 professor of mathematics, mechanics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam.

Together with his Ph.D. student Gustav de Vries, he developed the ( Korteweg -de Vries equation), a non-linear partial differential equation of the third order. It was first proposed in 1895 by Korteweg and de Vries for the analysis of shallow water waves in narrow channels.