Donald L. Turcotte

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald Lawson Turcotte (Don Turcotte) (born April 22, 1932 in Bellingham , Washington ) is an American geophysicist .

Turcotte studied at Caltech , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954 and his doctorate in aeronautical engineering ( An Experimental Investigation of Flame Stabilization in a Heated Turbulent Boundary Layer ) with Frank E. Marble in 1958 . He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an assistant professor in aircraft engineering at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey . From 1959 he was an assistant professor and later professor of aerospace engineering at Cornell University (where he obtained a master’s degree in 1955). In 1973 he switched to a professorship for geology and was head of the Faculty of Geosciences from 1973 to 1990. In 1965/66 he was a National Science Fellow at the University of Oxford and 1972/73 Guggenheim Fellow. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Davis .

He deals with geodynamics, in particular the forces driving mantle convection and plate tectonics, geology of planets, applications of the theory of dynamic systems to geological problems (such as self-organized criticality , fractals , chaos theory ).

He received the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America in 1981, the Regents Medal of New York State in 1984, the Alfred Wegener Medal of the European Union of Geoscience in 1991 , the Charles A. Whitten Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 1995 and the William Bowie Medal in 2003 . In 1982 he was William Smith Lecturer at the Geological Society of London. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was head of the Quantitative Geodynamics division of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics and headed the Tectonophysics section of the American Geophysical Union. He has been married since 1957 and has two children.

Fonts

  • with Gerald Schubert: Geodynamics , 1st edition, Wiley 1982, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press 2002

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Website at Cornell University. After American Men and Women of Science , he was a board member from 1980 to 1984
personal data
SURNAME Turcotte, Donald L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Turcotte, Donald Lawson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Bellingham , Washington