Julian Cole

Julian David Cole (born April 2, 1925 in Brooklyn , † April 17, 1999 in Albany , New York ) was an American applied mathematician , known for contributions to perturbation theory .

Life

Cole studied engineering at Cornell University and Caltech , where he studied with Hans Liepmann and Paco Lagerstrom . In 1949 he received his doctorate on transonic flow at Caltech at Lagerstrom . He was at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (Galcit) at Caltech. There he developed important perturbative methods of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics , which later found widespread use. He was later a scientific liaison officer at the Office of Naval Research in London, a scientist at Boeing and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute .

At the Galcit in the 1940s, he first investigated the transonic flow range, which was an important research area at the time with the beginning of supersonic flight. In his first published scientific work with Liepmann in 1948 he foresaw the possibility of shock wave-free transonic wing profiles, in whose development he later played an important role (development of finite difference methods in this area at Boeing with Earll Murman 1968/68, published 1971). He showed with Lagerstrom and Lionel Trilling that weak shock waves for certain solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation can be described by the Burgers equation and found a solution for this equation by the Hopf-Cole transformation . The conception of the equations of boundary layer theory as an asymptotic development of the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation for infinite Reynolds number plus rescaling was developed by Cole and Lagerstrom at that time. In the late 1950s, he and Jerry Kevorkian developed multi-scale methods in perturbation theory.

Cole is the author of several standard works on perturbative methods. His first book on it (Perturbation methods in applied mathematics) was written from lectures at Harvard in 1963/64.

In 1984 he received the Theodore von Kármán Prize . The SIAM's Julian Cole Lecture is named in his honor. He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering , the National Academy of Sciences (1976), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He received the US Air Force's Award for Meritorious Civilian Service, the AIAA's Fluid Dynamics Award, and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis. George Bluman and Jerry Kevorkian are among his 38 PhD students .

He was a passionate jogger and outdoor activist. His wife Susan Cole was also a math professor at Rensselaer Polytech.

Fonts

• Perturbation methods in applied mathematics , Springer Verlag 1968, 1981, 1996
• with J. Kevorkian Multiple scale and singular perturbation methods , Springer Verlag 1996
• with George Bluman Similarity methods for Differential Equations , Springer Verlag 1974
• with Pamela Cook Transonic Aerodynamics , Elsevier 1986

literature

• S LP Cook, V. Roytburd, M. Tulin (editors): Mathematics is for solving problems, SIAM 1996 (dedicated to Cole on his 70th birthday)

Web links

• Obituary by George Bluman et al. a., Notices AMS, 2000, No. 4
• Obituary at the National Academy of Engineering 2002
• Obituary by Pam Cooke, Marshall Tulin, Joe Flaherty at SIAM
• Obituary in the New York Times

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cole, Murman Calculation of Plane Steady Transonic Flows , AIAA Journal, Volume 9, January 1971, pp. 114-121, Science Citation Classics, pdf