George F. D. Duff

George Francis Denton Duff ( born July 28, 1926 in Toronto, Ontario; † 2 March 2001) was a Canadian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations.

Duff was the son of botany professor in Toronto George Henry Duff ( Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) and the lawyer Laura Duff. He studied from 1944 at the University of Toronto with a Master's thesis at Leopold Infeld on quantum mechanics (1949 ), and since 1949 at Princeton University ( among others, Donald Spencer ), where in 1951 he earned his doctorate under Solomon Lefschetz (Limit Cycles and Rotated vector fields ). He then Moore Instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1952 Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1957 he became associate professor in 1961 and professor. 1968-1975 he was there Board of mathematical faculty. In 1992 he retired, but remained at the Faculty of Mathematics active until his death. Duff has been a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Duff worked on elliptic and hyperbolic partial differential equations and in the 1980s, particularly with the Navier -Stokes equations. From the mid- 1960s, he dealt with issues of the use of high tidal range in the Bay of Fundy tidal power plants. He developed a mathematical theory of this tidal phenomenon, which he regarded as a standing wave, and carried about at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) 1974 in Vancouver ( Plenary Lecture: Mathematical problems of tidal energy). For this work he received in 1994 an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University. He has written several textbooks on partial differential equations and also with other school textbooks for the District of Ontario.

In 1959 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was from 1957 to 1961 and from 1978 to 1981 editor of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and President of the Canadian Mathematical Society. He was also for many years been the Mathematical Reports of the Royal Society of Canada and published in a history of the Canadian Mathematical Society.

He was married twice. From the first, in 1981 divorced marriage in 1951 he had five children.

Writings

• Partial Differential Equations, University of Toronto Press 1956
• With D. Naylor: differential equations of applied mathematics, Wiley 1966