James Lighthill

Sir James Lighthill ( born January 23, 1924 in Paris, † 17 July 1998 Sark ) was a British professor of applied mathematics.

Biography

Lighthill father was a mining engineer Ernest Balzar Lighthill, of Alsatian origin and its name was changed Lichtenberg during the First World War in order to avoid anti-German prejudice. The 54 -year-old father was working at the time of Lighthill birth in France and three years after his birth the family moved back to England.

Lighthill attended Winchester College, where he became friends with Freeman Dyson - together they studied the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead and the Cours d'Analyse of Camille Jordan. At the age of 15 years Lighthill received a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. He took the scholarship, however, only 2 years later, because he wanted to wait until he was 17. After two years of study, he received his bachelor's degree in 1943.

During his time in Cambridge he met Nancy Dumaresq know, studied mathematics at Newnham College. After his studies, he tried for a job at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough because his girlfriend worked there now, but then took a job at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington in the department of aerodynamics. He married Dumaresq in 1945 after he had finished his work at the National Physical Laboratory. 1945-1949 he was a Fellow of Trinity College.

Lighthill 1946 lecturer at the University of Manchester. Here he established a department that dealt with hydrodynamics and quickly dominated the English research in the field. In 1950 he was appointed professor of applied mathematics in Manchester. Since the mid 1940s he worked intensively with supersonic flows around airfoils and the associated thermodynamics of shock waves. In addition, he developed the bases for formulating an acoustic analogy to describe the flow noise, which today still forms the basis of a variety of approaches in numerical aeroacoustics ( Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1952, 1954). He showed that the generation of noise increases with the eighth power of aircraft speed.

In 1959 he left Manchester and the Director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough was. Here he worked on the development of commercial TV and communications satellites and manned space flight. His work in the field of supersonic aircraft was later important in the development of Concorde.

Another of its fields was nonlinear dynamics ( particularly in acoustics including active noise control ), applications to the study of road traffic flows, meteorological applications and flow physics of biological systems (of flow in arteries, the flight of birds, swimming fish up to the locomotion of amoebae ).

After he had become a member of the Royal Society in 1953, he became in 1964 the Royal Society Research Professor at Imperial College in London. In the same year he founded in order to achieve a better Advancement of Applied Mathematics, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, he was its first director in 1967. Also in 1964 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society.

When Paul Dirac in 1969 gave the Luca -sian Institute in Cambridge, Lighthill was appointed as his successor. He held ten years until he was replaced by Stephen Hawking This professorship. This was followed by Lighthill Head ( Provost ), University College London, where he stayed until his retirement in 1989. Although he was busy with fundraising and administration, he still found time to do research. So he employed, for example, to with chaotic systems, the use of wave energy and the human hearing. After his retirement, he was chairman of an international committee to reduce the impact of natural disasters, the International Council of Scientific Unions.

In 1973 he was chairman of a committee in the UK, which should investigate (on behalf of the British Science Research Council ), the prospects of artificial intelligence research ( AI). The " Lighthill Report" was a very critical assessment of this research direction (including language processing and robotics). As a result, state support for AI in the UK was set up in two universities.

His passion to swim around islands in the world, of which he liked to tell, was on 17 July 1998 he finally undoing. Due to a heart valve defect he died while trying to swim around the Channel Island of Sark for the sixth time ( he had nine miles nearly completed ). He left behind his wife, a son and four daughters.

In 1964 he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. In 1965 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society ( which he was a Fellow in 1961 ) and the 1981 Harvey Price in Israel. He was since 1958 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Philosophical Society, the U.S. National Academy of Science ( 1976), the French Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering ( 1977). In 1984 he received the G. I. Taylor Medal.

1965 to 1969 he was secretary and then vice president of the Royal Society. 1984 to 1988 he was President of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. He has received 24 honorary doctorates, among others, from Princeton, Aachen, Lisbon, Paris, St. Petersburg. In 1971 he was knighted by the Queen. In 1986 he became an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

Writings

• Collected Papers, 5 volumes, Oxford University Press 1997
• On sound generated aerodynamically. I. General theory. Proc. Roy. Soc. 211 (A ), pp. 564-587, London, 1952.
• On sound generated aerodynamically. II Turbulence as a source of sound. Proc. Roy. Soc. 222 (A ), pp. 1-34, London, 1954.
• With G. B. Whitham On kinematic waves. I. Flood movement in long rivers, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, A 229, 1955, p.281 -316, II A theory of traffic flow on long crowded roads, Proc. Roy.Soc. A 229, 1955, S.317 -345
• Introduction to the theory of Fourier analysis and generalized functions. Bibliographical Institute, Mannheim, 1966 ( first Cambridge 1958).
• Waves in fluids, Cambridge University Press 1978, 2nd edition 2001, ISBN 0-521-01045-4
• An informal introduction to theoretical fluid mechanics, Oxford 1986
• Higher approximations in aerodynamics theory, Princeton 1960
• Mathematical Biofluiddynamics, SIAM 1975