Jerrold E. Marsden

Jerrold E. Marsden ( born August 17, 1942 in Ocean Falls, British Columbia, Canada; † 21 September 2010 in Pasadena, California ) was a Canadian mathematician who dealt among other things with differential geometry, geometric mechanics and symplectic geometry.

Life and work

Marsden studied mathematics at the University of Toronto and Princeton University, where he received his doctorate at Arthur Strong Wightman 1968 ( Hamiltonian one parameter groups and Generalized Hamiltonian Mechanics ). After that, he was a professor at Berkeley. From 1995 he was professor at the Control and Dynamical Systems Department at Caltech. He was a visiting professor at, among others, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Toronto and at Cornell University. He is one of the founders of the named after John Charles Fields Fields Institute in Toronto in 1991.

Marsden -founded with Alan Weinstein, the ( symplectic ) reduction theory of mechanical systems with symmetry. He worked on a variety of applications of mechanics ( rigid body mechanics, plasma physics, hydrodynamics, elasticity theory, celestial mechanics and space), in particular control theory.

In 1990 he received the Norbert Wiener Prize. 2000 he received the Max Planck Research Award. In 2005 he received the von Neumann Prize of the SIAM, and since 2006 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( On the motion of incompressible fluids with DG Ebin ).

Writings

• With Arthur Strong Wightman: Lectures on Statistical Mechanics. Princeton 1967.
• Lectures on Mechanics. Cambridge University Press 1992.
• With Ralph Abraham, Foundations of Mechanics. 2nd edition, AMS, 2008.
• With T. Hughes: Foundations of Elasticity. Prentice- Hall 1983, Dover 1994.
• With Ralph Abraham, Tudor Ratiu: Manifolds, Tensor Analysis and Applications. Springer 1988.
• With Ratiu: Mechanics and Symmetry. Springer 1994, 2nd edition 2000.
• With Ratiu, Cendrea: Geometric Mechanics, Lagrangian Reduction and nonholonomic system. In: Engquist, W.Schmid (ed.): Mathematics Unlimited -2001 and Beyond. Springer 2000.
• Alexandre Chorin: A mathematical introduction to fluid mechanics. Springer 1993.
• Wang Sang Koon, Martin W. Loo, Shane D. Ross: Dynamical systems, the three body problem- and space mission design.
• Lectures on geometric methods in mathematical physics. SIAM 1981.
• Applications of global analysis to mathematical physics. Publish or Perish 1974.
• With Marjorie McCracken: The Hopf bifurcation and its applications. Springer 1976.
• With Misiolek, Ortega, Matthew Perlmutter, Ratiu: Hamiltonian Reduction by Stages. Springer 2007.
• Alan Weinstein, Anthony Tromba: Basic Multivariable Calculus. Freeman, 1983, 1993, Springer 1992.
• With Weinstein: Calculus 1,2,3. 2nd edition, Springer 1985.
• With Weinstein: Calculus Unlimited. Benjamin - Cummings in 1981.
• By Anthony Tromba: Vector Calculus. Freeman 1976, 5th edition 2003.
• Michael Hoffman: Elementary classical analysis. Freeman 1974, 1993.
• With Hoffman: Basic complex analysis. Freeman 1998.