Robert Balson Dingle

Robert Balson Dingle (born March 26, 1926 in Manchester , † March 2, 2010 in St Andrews ) was a British theoretical physicist and university professor.

Life

Dingle studied at Cambridge University , UK, where he received his PhD in 1952 under Douglas Rayner Hartree . He had previously spent a research year with Nevill Francis Mott and Herbert Fröhlich at the University of Bristol from 1947 to 1948 . Years of research followed at the University of Delft in the Netherlands and at the University of Ottawa in Canada . He then received an appointment as a reader (at that time in Germany corresponding to an associate professorship) at the Physics Institute of the University of Western Australia in Perth . In mid-1960 he took up his position as the first professor of theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he stayed until his retirement (due to illness).

Dingle's research areas were condensed matter, statistical physics, the anomalous skin effect, the conductivity of thin wires, and liquid helium II. Mathematically, he had also published various works on Fermi-Dirac integrals and Bose-Einstein integrals. His best-known research area, however, became the investigation of asymptotic developments in mathematics and physics with the aim of extracting information from the divergent part of an asymptotic development in order to determine the corresponding function as precisely as possible. His research on this topic, in which he took completely new paths, he has laid down in his extensive monograph on asymptotic developments.

Awards

• Membership in the Royal Society of Edinburgh

literature

• RB Dingle: Asymptotic Expansions: Their Derivation and Interpretation. Academic Press, 1973.

Web links

• Royal Society Edinburgh website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ RB Dingle, Proc. Roy. Soc. A244 (1958) 456, 476, 484; A249 (1959) 270, 285, 293.