Cargill Gilston Knott
Cargill Gilston Knott (born June 30, 1856 in Penicuik , † October 26, 1922 in Edinburgh ) was a Scottish physicist and applied mathematician and pioneer of seismology .
Knott studied physics at the University of Edinburgh and received his PhD in 1879. Then he was there assistant and from 1883 professor at the University of Tokyo on the recommendation of Lord Kelvin . There was a program under way (by Scottish engineer Richard Henry Brunton ) to build lighthouses that needed to be earthquake-proof. For this reason, foreign scientists were invited to study earthquakes and constructed a seismograph, including the physicist James Alfred Ewing , the engineer Thomas Lomar Gray (1850-1908) and the geologist John Milne (1850-1913). In 1883, Knott joined Ewing, who was returning to Great Britain. Knott taught mathematics and physics and together with Milne and Gray and the Japanese Fusakichi Omori built a network of seismographs. Knott applied Fourier analysis to the processing of the seismograph data and undertook a geomagnetic mapping of Japan with the geophysicist Tanakadate Aikitsu . In 1885 he married Mary Dixon. In 1891 he returned to Edinburgh, where he became a reader for applied mathematics at the university.
In seismology he is also known for equations that describe the reflection of seismic waves on rock layers (1899).
He also developed the theory of quaternions that his teacher Peter Guthrie Tait promoted. At the time, it was considered a promising alternative to the vector calculus, which then caught on. He wrote a biography of Tait for his Collected Works and edited a commemorative volume for the 300th birthday of John Napier .
He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1920) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1880) and President of the Scottish Meteorological Society (since 1921 merged with the Royal Meteorological Society ). In 1891 he received the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese Emperor.
Fonts
- with Philip Kelland, Peter Guthrie Tait: Introduction to Quaternions, Macmillan 1904
- The Physics of Earthquake Phenomena, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1908
- Physics, An Elementary Textbook, London 1913
literature
- Edmund Taylor Whittaker : Cargill Gilston Knott (obituary), Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Volume 43, 1922, pp. 237-248
- Keith Edward Bullen , Article Knott in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Knott, Cargill Gilston |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish physicist and applied mathematician and a pioneer in seismology |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 30, 1856 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Penicuik |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 26, 1922 |
| Place of death | Edinburgh |