Clive W. Kilmister

Clive William Kilmister (born January 3, 1924 in Epping (Essex) , † May 2, 2010 ) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical physicist , professor at King's College London .

Life

Kilmister was the son of a wood pattern maker and went to school in London (Leyton). He studied at Queen Mary College of the University of London ( Bachelor in 1944, Master in 1948) and received his doctorate in 1950 from George McVittie (The use of quaternions in wave-tensor calculus). He then was an assistant lecturer in mathematics at King's College, University of London, where he founded a research group on gravitational theory with Hermann Bondi and Felix Pirani in the mid-1950s . In 1953 he was a lecturer and in 1959 a reader. He became a professor at King's College in 1966 and was temporarily head of the mathematics faculty. From 1972 to 1988 he was Gresham Professor of Geometry. In 1984 he retired .

Kilmister dealt with the fundamentals of physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity, and with the expansion and clarification of the later physical theories of Arthur Eddington , which were otherwise rejected by most physicists as opaque and speculative despite Eddington's reputation. He was interested in the history , philosophy and pedagogy of mathematics and wrote numerous books, including on Eddington and Bertrand Russell , mechanics, special and general relativity .

From 1979 to 1980 he was President of the Mathematical Association, 1974 to 1976 of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and 1981/82 of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. Since 1949 he was a member of the London Mathematical Society . He was one of the main organizers of the 4th Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in London.

With his long-time colleague Ted Bastin, he founded the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association in the late 1970s.

He had been married to Peggy Hutchins since 1956 and had a son and two daughters.

Fonts

• with BOJ Tupper: Eddington's Statistical Theory. Oxford Mathematical Monographs, Clarendon Press 1962
• Hamiltonian Dynamics. Wiley 1964
• Special Theory of Relativity. Pergamon Press 1970
• General Theory of Relativity. Pergamon Press 1973
• The Environment in Modern Physics: A Study in Relativistic Mechanics. American Elsevier 1965
• Men of Physics: Sir Arthur Eddington. Pergamon Press 1966
• with EJ Reevee: Rational Mechanics. American Elsevier 1966
• Language, Logic, and Mathematics. English Universities Press 1967
• Exploring University Mathematics 2: Lectures Given at Bedford College. 1968
• The Nature of the Universe. (World of Science), New York: Dutton 1971
• Relativistic Mechanics, Time and Inertia. (Fundamental Theories of Physics), 1984
• with Brian H. Chirgwin, C. Plumpton: Elementary electromagnetic theory. 3 volumes, Pergamon Press 1971–1973
• Russell. (Philosophers in Context), St. Martin's Press 1984
• Special Relativity for Physicists. London, Longmans Green 1958, 1987
• Editor: Schrödinger: Centenary Celebration of a Polymath. Cambridge University Press 1987
• with Ted Bastin: Combinatorial Physics. World Scientific 1995
• Lagrangian Dynamics: An Introduction for Students. London: Logos, 1967
• Eddington's Search for a Fundamental Theory: A Key to the Universe. Cambridge University Press 2005
• with Ted Bastin: The Origin of Discrete Particles. (Series on Knots and Everything), World Scientific 2009
• Editor: Disequilibrium and Self Organization. Reidel 1986

Web links

• Obituary Clive Kilmister . In: Newsletter of the London Mathematical Society . tape 394 , 2010 (English, archive.org ).
• David Robinson: Death of Clive Kilmister. May 31, 2010, archived from the original on May 14, 2014 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career data according to Debus World Who's Who in Science 1968
2. ↑ Clive W. Kilmister in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)