Norman Zabusky

Norman J. Zabusky (born January 4, 1929 in Brooklyn - † February 5, 2018 ) was an American physicist .

Life

Zabusky studied electrical engineering at the City College of New York (Bachelor 1951) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Master's degree 1953). He then turned to theoretical physics and received his doctorate in 1959 at Caltech with a thesis on plasma physics (with Milton Plesset ). 1961 to 1976 he was a physicist at Bell Laboratories and then Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh . In 1988 he became professor of numerical hydrodynamics at Rutgers University . After retiring in 2006, he went to the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

Zabusky dealt in particular with numerical hydrodynamics and their visualization (which he called visiometrics ). He became known through the discovery of soliton solutions of the Korteweg-de-Vries equation with Martin Kruskal in 1965.

In 1986 he received the Potts Medal of the Franklin Institute and in 2003 the Otto Laporte Prize for his pioneering work and subsequent development in nonlinear physics and computational hydrodynamics including the soliton, edge dynamics and V-states in two-dimensional flows, vortex projectiles for accelerated inhomogeneous flows and visiometrics for modeling In 1970 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

He died on February 5, 2018 at the age of 89.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Martin Kruskal, Norman Zabusky Interaction of "solitons" in a collisionless plasma and the recurrence of initial states. In: Physical Review Letters , Volume 15 (1965), pp. 240-243.
2. ↑ Laudation : For pioneering and enduring contributions in nonlinear and vortex physics and computational fluid dynamics, including: the soliton; contour dynamics and V-states for 2D flows; vortex projectiles for accelerated inhomogeneous flows; and visiometrics for reduced modeling.
3. ^ Announcement from the American Mathematical Society , accessed April 19, 2018