Geoffrey Ingram Taylor

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Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (often called GI for short) (born March 7, 1886 in St John's Wood, England , † June 27, 1975 in Cambridge , England) was a British applied mathematician and physicist. His main focus was hydrodynamics , with his research covering fields of application from oceanography to supersonic flight.

Taylor was the son of a painter (and interior decorator of ocean liners) and the maternal grandson of George Boole ( Alicia Boole Stott was his aunt). He was interested in natural sciences from a young age (as a youth he met Lord Kelvin ) and studied at University College from 1899 and from 1905 at Trinity College , Cambridge, with a scholarship that he won . First he studied mathematics with Godfrey Harold Hardy , Alfred North Whitehead and Edmund Taylor Whittaker , among others , then switched to physics. He won the Smith Prize for a thesis on shock waves , worked experimentally under JJ Thomson, and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1910. His preoccupation with turbulence led him to become a Reader in Dynamic Meteorology, and in 1915 earned him the Adams Prize . As a meteorologist, he was on board the iceberg patrols on the Scotia in 1913 , which were set up after the Titanic sinking.

During World War I he worked theoretically on the mechanical loading and stability of propeller blades in the state aircraft factory in Farnborough , where he also learned to fly and skydive. After the war he was a lecturer at Trinity College and from 1923 Royal Society Research Professor, whereupon he devoted himself entirely to research. During World War II, he studied shock waves in explosions, both in the air and under water. In 1952 he retired, but continued to research until he had to give up his research in 1972 for health reasons (stroke).

The large number of names named after him ( Taylor number , Taylor-Couette instability with Maurice Couette , Taylor vortex , Rayleigh-Taylor instability , Taylor microscale , Saffman-Taylor instability (with Philip Saffman ), Taylor-Proudman -Theorem , Taylor dispersion ) testifies to his achievements in hydrodynamics. Not only was he an excellent theorist, he also experimented, for which he had his own room in the Cavendish Laboratory.

In 1908, in a diffraction experiment with a very weak light source ( Taylor experiment ) , he showed the quantum nature of light, which Albert Einstein had previously predicted.

In 1919 he was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1933 awarded him the Royal Medal and in 1944 the Copley Medal . In 1925 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . The Royal Society of Edinburgh accepted him in 1938 as an Honorary Fellow . In 1945 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1946 to the Académie des sciences , 1955 to the American Philosophical Society and 1956 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1965 he was awarded the James Watt Medal . In 1972 he received the first Theodore von Kármán Prize .

From 1925 until her death in 1967 he was married to Stephanie Ravenhill but had no children. In his spare time he was busy with botany. He was also an avid sailor and invented his own anchor construction.

The Society of Engineering awards the GI Taylor Medal in his honor .

literature

  • George Batchelor : The Life and Legacy of GI Taylor. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1996, ISBN 0-521-46121-9 (Review by Peter Bradshaw in: Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. New Series Vol. 34, No. 3, 1997, ISSN  0273-0979 , p. 313 -315, doi : 10.1090 / S0273-0979-97-00720-9 ).
  • George K. Batchelor: An unfinished dialogue with GI Taylor. In: Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Vol. 70, No. 4, 1975, ISSN  0022-1120 , pp. 625-638, doi : 10.1017 / S0022112075002248 .
  • George K. Batchelor (Ed.): The scientific papers of Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor. 4 volumes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1958-1971 (Volume 1: Mechanics of solids. 1958; Volume 2: Meteorology, Oceanography and Turbulent Flow. 1960; Volume 3: Aerodynamics and the mechanics of projectiles and explosions. 1963; Volume 4: Mechanics of Fluids . Miscellaneous Papers. 1971).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 238.
  2. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 15, 2020 .
  3. ^ Memoirs of Albert Green
personal data
SURNAME Taylor, Geoffrey Ingram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH St John's Wood, England
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1975
Place of death Cambridge , England