Gilbert Walker
Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker ( born June 14, 1868 in Rochdale, Lancashire, † November 4, 1958 in Coulsdon, Surrey ) was a British physicist and meteorologist.
Life and work
Walker was the son of a civil engineer and attended from 1881 with a grant from the St. Paul's School in London, where he excelled in mathematics and received a prize for one he built gyroscope. In 1886 he studied on a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge mathematics. In the Tripos examinations in 1889, he was Senior Wrangler (first ) in 1891 and Fellow of Trinity College. At the same time he suffered in 1890 due to overwork a breakdown and therefore recovered for several years in winter in Switzerland, where he developed a passion for skiing and mountaineering. In 1895 he was a lecturer there in mathematics. In 1899 he won the prestigious Joseph Larmor Smith Prize for a paper on electrodynamics ( aberration and someother problems connected with the electromagnetic field ). In 1901 he went to India to work for the meteorological service, as assistant to the conductor Sir John Eliot, and after his retirement in 1903 as its director. 1904 Walker was a Fellow of the Royal Society and received in the same year a D.Sc. the University of Cambridge. In 1924 he became Head of the meteorological service back in India and became a professor of meteorology at Imperial College in London. In 1934 he retired and moved to Cambridge.
Since a trip to Australia in the late 1880s he was at Boomerangs interested ( in Cambridge, therefore, also known as " Boomerang Walker " known), and he published an essay about their mechanics in 1897 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ( Ser. A, Vol 190, p.23 -42). About the mathematical aspects of games and sports, for which he was an expert at Cambridge, he wrote in 1900 an article in the Encyclopedia of mathematical sciences (for example, boomerangs, golf, bicycles, billiards). He also wrote essays about the mechanics of bird flight ( Proc. Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol 21, 1923, Proc. Royal Aeronautical Society Vol 29, 1925, Bd.31, 1927, article " Natural Flight", Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929) and was an expert on the acoustics of the flute, which he played himself.
As a meteorologist, he presented statistical studies of the monsoon season points ( where he also created links to the times of the Nile floods ), which was for agriculture in India is of eminent importance ( the failure of the monsoon in 1899 led for example to a severe famine ). His statistical tests were not very successful in predicting the monsoon, but carried meteorological research. After analyzing huge amounts of data from weather India and other countries for over 15 years, he published the first explanation of the oscillations of the air pressure and its correlation with the temperature and the rainfall in the tropical areas of the world. Walker also described the El Nino phenomenon. 1935 to 1941 he was editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. He was a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and in 1926 and 1927 its president. In 1934, he received her Symons Gold Medal.
According to him and George Udny Yule, the Yule- Walker equations are named.
He was married in 1908 and had a son and a daughter.