Pierre Tardi

Pierre Antoine Ernest Tardi (born June 4, 1897 in Bastia , † August 5, 1972 in Paris ) was a French geodesist and astronomer .

Life

Born in Bastia on the island of Corsica , Tardi joined the military as a war volunteer in 1915. After the end of the First World War he stayed with the French army and entered the geodetic department of the geographic service of the army in 1920 and continued his academic education at the school of this institute and at the École polytechnique . In the 1920s and until the early 1930s he worked on military-led geodetic missions in Syria, Morocco and Romania in addition to France. In 1934 he published a two-volume work on geodesy, which he expanded to four volumes by 1951. In the Institut géographique national , founded in 1940 , he held leading positions until the 1950s. In 1942 he became director of the École nationale des sciences geographiques affiliated with this institute . In 1945 he became professor of astronomy at the École polytechnique. His keen interest in international cooperation in the field of geodesy led to his being elected Secretary General of the International Association of Geodesy in 1946. From 1948 to 1961 he was director of the company's central office in Paris. In this function, he specifically campaigned for the geodetic use of earth satellites and the application of electronic computing technology.

From 1943 he was a corresponding member of the Bureau des Longitudes and from 1960 to 1963 President of this institute. In 1958 he also took over the management of the International Gravimetric Office in Toulouse. He was a member of the International Astronomical Union and from 1947 to 1955 Chairman of the Commission for Geographic Positioning.

Since 1956 Tardi was a member of the Académie des Sciences . In 1970 he became its president. Since 1961 he was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and since 1962 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctorate from the ETH Zurich .

literature

• Peter Wellmann: Pierre Tardi (obituary) . In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . 1973 ( online [PDF; accessed May 8, 2017]).
• J. Kovalevsky: Pierre Tardi (1897-1972) . In: L'Astronomie . tape 87 , 1973, pp. 128–130 , bibcode : 1973LAstr..87..128K .

Web links

• Short biography at the Sociétés savantes de France (French)
• Publications in the Astrophysics Data System
• Literature by and about Pierre Tardi in the WorldCat bibliographic database