J. Freeman Gilbert
James Freeman Gilbert (born August 9, 1931 in Vincennes , Indiana , † August 15, 2014 in Portland , Oregon ) was an American geophysicist .
Gilbert studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1953 and his PhD in geophysics in 1956 . He then went to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he became an Assistant Professor in 1957 and an Associate Professor in 1960 . In 1960/61 he was a research geophysicist at Texas Instruments . From 1961 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego , and at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , of which he was Associate Director from 1976 to 1988. Since 2001 he has been Professor Emeritus there . In 1987 he was a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech , 1973 visiting professor in Utrecht (Veining Meinesz Institute for Geophysics) and 1964/65 and 1972/73 as a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Cambridge .
Gilbert was one of the discoverers of the free vibrational modes of the earth, which he found with Adam Dziewoński from analyzing the data of the Alaska earthquake of 1964 and later the earthquake in Colombia in 1970. Frank Press and Maurice Ewing also succeeded at about the same time . For this purpose he developed the Backus-Gilbert method of inversion of seismic data with George Edward Backus . In the early 1970s he was involved in the installation of a worldwide network of seismometers for studying the interior of the earth, the IDA Array (Project IDA, International Deployment of Accelerometers), the first 40 stations of which went into operation in 1974.
In 1981 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society , 1999 the William Bowie Medal , 1990 the Balzan Prize , 1985 the Arthur L. Day Medal of the Geological Society of America and 2004 the Medal of the Seismological Society of America . He was an honorary doctor from Utrecht University and the Colorado School of Mines. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961).
He had been married since 1959 and had three children.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , 22nd edition, Thomson Gale 2004
- ^ Obituary Notice: J. Freeman Gilbert, Leading Scripps Oceanography Geophysicist. scripps.ucsd.edu, August 21, 2014
- ^ Backus, Gilbert: The Resolving power of Gross Earth Data. In: Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Volume 16, 1968, pp. 169-205; Backus, Gilbert: Uniqueness in the Inversion of Inaccurate Gross Earth Data. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Volume 266, 1970, pp. 123-192.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gilbert, J. Freeman |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gilbert, James Freeman (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American geophysicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 9, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vincennes , Indiana |
| DATE OF DEATH | 15th August 2014 |
| Place of death | Portland , Oregon |