Gustav Kürti

Gustav Kürti , also Gustav Kuerti , (born April 7, 1903 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died July 11, 1978 in Cleveland , Ohio ) was an Austrian-American mathematician and physicist who studied aerodynamics .

Gustav Kürti studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna , where he received his doctorate in 1926 (on the reduction of plane parallel grids and the corresponding Dirichlet neighborhood figures). From 1927 to 1938 he was a grammar school teacher in Vienna, but at the same time from 1931 he was also a freelancer at the Institute for Radium Research at the University of Vienna. After Austria's annexation in 1938, he fled to the USA (where his wife and son followed him from Turkey in 1939) and was a Research Fellow at the University of Rochester from 1939 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1941 . In 1942 he became an assistant to Richard von Mises at Harvard University and in 1946 he became an assistant professor of aerodynamics there. In 1951 he moved to the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory near Washington DC and in 1952 he became an associate and 1955 professor of aerodynamics at the Case Institute of Technology . In 1968 he retired.

In 1965, 1968 and 1969 he was visiting professor in Halle and Rostock.

He obtained the English edition of Klaus Oswatitsch's book on gas dynamics (Gas Dynamics, Academic Press 1956) and also translated the second volume (Mechanics of Deformable Bodies) of Arnold Sommerfeld's lectures on theoretical physics into English. Like William Prager, he worked on the book Theory of Flight by Richard von Mises (McGraw Hill 1945).

In 1933 he married the biologist Rosa Jahoda (1905-2004), the sister of Marie Jahoda . Their son Anton Kuerti (* 1938) lives as a composer and pianist in Canada.

literature

• Maximilian Pinl colleagues in a dark time , annual report DMV, 75, 1973 p. 195
• Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 670f.

Web links

• Biography page of Marie Jahoda, with biography of Kürti (Retrieved April 23, 2018)
• Gustav Kürti , at OEAW (accessed April 23, 2018)

References and comments

1. ↑ Title of the dissertation according to Pinl and Gustav Kürti in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ↑ Claudia Wurzinger: Kuerti, Rosi. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , p. 416f.