Francis Murnaghan (mathematician)
Francis Dominic Murnaghan (born August 4, 1893 in Omagh , Ireland , † March 24, 1976 in Baltimore ) was an American mathematician in the field of applied mathematics and professor at Johns Hopkins University .
His father was the Irish MP George Murnaghan, who lived temporarily in the United States and had made it prosperous there. Murnaghan studied mathematics at University College Dublin with a bachelor's degree in 1913. After his plan to continue his studies in Germany failed because of the First World War, he went to Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Harry Bateman and in 1916 with Frank Morley PhD (The lines of electric force due to a moving electron). He was a lecturer at Rice University , associate professor in 1918 and professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1928, where he became head of the mathematics department and retired in 1949. After his retirement he taught at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica near São Paulo in Brazil until 1959 and then returned to Baltimore, where he was a consultant at the David Taylor Model Basin of the US Navy. He was also scientifically active with a last publication in 1972.
He dealt with continuum mechanics (hydrodynamics and elasticity theory) and various other areas of theoretical physics and published several textbooks in English and Portuguese. Two equations of state in continuum mechanics - used for the behavior of matter at high pressures - are named after him (one also after the geophysicist Albert Francis Birch , Birch-Murnaghan's equation of state ). As a mathematician, he was particularly interested in representations of groups.
He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Philosophical Society , the Royal Irish Academy , the American Physical Society, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
He married in 1919 Ada Mary Kimbell, with whom he had a son - the future US Federal Judge Francis Dominic Murnaghan, Jr. (1920-2000) - and a daughter Patricia, who studied mathematics and became a teacher.
His PhD students include Earl Coddington and Philip Hartman .
Fonts
- Vector analysis and the theory of relativity, Johns Hopkins Press 1922
- with Joseph Sweetman Ames: Theoretical Mechanics- an introduction to mathematical physics, 1929, Reprint Dover 1958
- Introduction to Applied Mathematics, Wiley 1948
- Analytic Geometry, Prentice Hall 1946
- with Harry Bateman, Hugh Dryden: Report of the Committee on Hydrodynamics, Washington DC 1932 (Report for the National Research Council, Reprint Dover 1956)
- Lectures on Applied Mathematics, 3 volumes, Spartan Books, Washington DC 1962:
- The Laplace Transformation
- Unitary and Rotation Groups
- Calculus of Variations
- The orthogonal and symplectic groups, Dublin Institute for Advanced Study 1958
- The theory of group representations, The Johns Hopkins Press 1938, Dover 1963
- Finite deformation of an elastic solid, Wiley 1951
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Francis Murnaghan (mathematician). In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Francis Murnaghan in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Murnaghan, Francis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Murnaghan, Francis Dominic (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th August 1893 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Omagh , Ireland |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 24, 1976 |
| Place of death | Baltimore |