Gilbert Walker

This article is about the physicist Gilbert Walker; for the politician of the same name, see Gilbert Carlton Walker .

Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker (born June 14, 1868 in Rochdale , Lancashire , † November 4, 1958 in Coulsdon in Surrey ) was a British physicist and meteorologist.

Live and act

Walker was the son of a civil engineer and from 1881 attended St. Paul's School in London on a scholarship. There he excelled in mathematics and received an award for a top he built . In 1886 he studied mathematics on a scholarship at Trinity College , Cambridge . He was Senior Wrangler (first) in the Tripos exams in 1889 and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1891 . In 1890 he suffered a breakdown due to overwork and therefore recovered over several years in winter in Switzerland, where he developed a passion for skiing and mountaineering. In 1895 he became a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge . In 1899 he won the prestigious Smith Prize with Joseph Larmor for a thesis on electrodynamics .

In 1901 he went to India to work as assistant to the head Sir John Eliot for the meteorological service, after his retirement in 1903 he took over the management himself. In 1904, Walker became a Fellow of the Royal Society and received a D.Sc. Cambridge University. In 1924 he resigned as head of the meteorological service in India and became professor of meteorology at Imperial College London . He was a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and its President in 1926 and 1927. In 1934 he retired and moved to Cambridge.

In 1934 he received the Symons Gold Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society and was editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1935 to 1941 .

Since a stay in Australia in the late 1880s he was interested in boomerangs , in Cambridge therefore also known as "Boomerang Walker", and in 1897 published an essay on their mechanics. He wrote an article in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences in 1900 about the mathematical aspects of games and sports, for example boomerangs, golf, bicycles and billiards, for which he was an expert at Cambridge . He also wrote essays on the mechanics of bird flight and was an expert on the acoustics of the flute, which he also played himself.

As a meteorologist, he made statistical studies of the beginning of the monsoons and also made connections to the times of the Nile floods . This was of eminent importance to agriculture in India; the failure of the monsoon in 1899, for example, led to a severe famine. His statistical investigations were not very successful in predicting the monsoons, but they promoted meteorological research. After analyzing huge amounts of weather data from India and other countries over 15 years, he published the first explanation of the oscillations in air pressure and its correlation with the temperature and the amount of rain in the tropical regions of the world. Walker also described the El Nino phenomenon and in connection with it came across the Walker circulation named after him , a zonal wind circulation at the level of the equator that is reversed during El Niño events.

The Yule-Walker equations are named after him and George Udny Yule . He had been married since 1908 and had a son and a daughter.

Web links

• JM Walker: A Pen Portrait of Sir Gilbert Walker. In: Weather. Vol. 52, No. 7, 1997, pp. 217–220 (English, PDF file)
• Weather Brains: Sir Gilbert Walker. Weatheronline.co.uk (English)

Remarks

1. ^ Aberration and some other problems connected with the electromagnetic field. In 1908 he gave lectures on electrodynamics at the University of Calcutta, which were published in 1910 by Cambridge University Press.
2. ^ In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Series A, Vol. 190, pp. 23-42.
3. ^ In: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Vol. 21, 1923; Proceedings of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Vol. 29, 1925 and Vol. 31, 1927; Article Natural Flight in the Encyclopedia Britannica , 1929.