Milton Plesset
Milton Spinoza Plesset (born February 7, 1908 in Pittsburgh , † February 19, 1991 ) was an American physicist and engineer.
biography
Plesset studied at the University of Pittsburgh (Bachelor's degree in 1929) and received his doctorate in 1932 from Yale University under Leigh Page ( The Relativity Electron in Simple Fields and The Thermionic Properties of Cesium Coated Nickel ). He then went to Caltech , where he worked with Robert Oppenheimer on early quantum electrodynamics : shortly after the positron was discovered , they theoretically investigated the formation of electron-positron pairs. In 1933/34 he was at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen , where he worked with Christian Møller , John Archibald Wheeler and EJ Williams . From 1935 he taught at the University of Rochester and in 1940 went to Caltech. From 1942, he worked in aircraft development for Douglas Aircraft Corporation during World War II. In 1948 he became associate professor and 1951 professor at Caltech (since 1963 as professor of engineering), where he was professor emeritus from 1978. At the same time he was adjunct professor for nuclear technology at UCLA from 1977 to 1988 .
In 1934 he worked with Christian Møller on a quantum mechanical perturbation theory method, which was named after them and is used, for example, in quantum chemistry. He was primarily concerned with hydrodynamics, especially the dynamics of bubbles (the Rayleigh-Plesset equation is named after him and John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh ), with applications on the physics of nuclear reactors (multiphase hydrodynamics, safety issues in nuclear reactors ). From 1975 to 1982 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Norman Zabusky is one of his doctoral students .
In 1937 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . Since 1979 he was a member of the National Academy of Engineering . In 1986 he received the Fluids Engineering Award from ASME . He was a Fellow of ASME and the American Physical Society. In 1980 he was Thurston Lecturer at ASME and in 1971/72 headed its hydrodynamics department.
He was married twice, from his first marriage to the writer Isabel Rosanoff (died 1985) he had four children.
literature
- Theodore Wu: Obituary . In: National Academy of Engineering (ed.): Memorial Tributes . 1991. Online
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Plesset, Milton |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Plesset, Milton Spinoza (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 7, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pittsburgh |
| DATE OF DEATH | 19th February 1991 |