Arnold Nordsieck

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Arnold Theodore Nordsieck (born January 5, 1911 in Marysville (Ohio) , † January 19, 1971 in Santa Barbara (California) ) was an American theoretical physicist.

Nordsieck studied at Ohio State University (master's degree in physics in 1932) and received his doctorate in 1935 under Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California ( Scattering of radiation by an electric field ). He was a close collaborator of Robert Oppenheimer (with whom he read Plato in Ancient Greek) and of Felix Bloch of Stanford University . He was also a post-doctoral student in Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg . With Bloch he solved the infrared problem in the quantum electrodynamics , after which at the emission of braking radiation the scattering cross section is diverging due to the vanishing mass of the photons. Bloch and Nordsieck showed that this was only a pseudo problem of the perturbation theory used. This solution is named after both of them as the Bloch-Nordsieck theorem . From 1947 to 1961 he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He later worked for the General Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, where he was head of the physics department.

He built an analog computer (differential analyzer) at the University of Illinois in 1950 (from $ 700 worth of electronics left behind during World War II) and another that became the first computer at what would later become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory .

In 1953 he developed the electrostatically suspended gyroscope (ESG), which was then produced by Honeywell and other companies and used as a navigation instrument in nuclear submarines, among other things. Also for the US Navy, he proposed the Cornfield System , a computer-aided decision-making system that evaluated radar data for air defense on ships.

He was also a pioneer of computer simulation and in the 1960s with BL Hicks solved the full nonlinear Boltzmann equation in various non-equilibrium problems in gas dynamics . Nordsieck also published works on numerical mathematics.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1955.

Erwin Hahn (1949) is one of his doctoral students .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ On Nordsieck's doctoral supervisor and Nordsieck's students, pdf
  2. ^ Oppenheimer's biography in the obituaries of the National Academy of Sciences
  3. ↑ Bloch, Nordsieck Note on the radiation field of the electron , Physical Review, Volume 52, 1937, p. 54
  4. ↑ Death report in Science 1971
  5. ↑ History of Physics at the University of Illinois in the 1950s, photo by Nordsieck with his computer
  6. ↑ Photo of Nordsieck with his gyroscope ( memento of the original from March 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.airbearings.com
  7. ^ Nordsieck, Hicks Monte Carlo evaluation of the Boltzmann collision integral , in CL Brundin (editor), Proc. 5th Int. Symp. Rarefied Gas Dynamics, Academic Press, Volume 1, 1967, p. 695
  8. ↑ Nordsieck On numerical integration of ordinary differential equations , Mathematics of Computation, Volume 16, 1962, pp. 22-49
personal data
SURNAME Nordsieck, Arnold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nordsieck, Arnold Theodore (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Marysville , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH 19th January 1971
Place of death Santa Barbara