Robert Richtmyer

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Robert Davis Richtmyer (born October 10, 1910 in Ithaca , NY ; † September 24, 2003 in Gardner , Colorado ) was an American physicist and applied mathematician who a. a. dealt with the numerics of differential equations and hydrodynamics .

Life

Richtmyer was the son of the physicist Floyd Karker Richtmyer (1881-1939). He studied in Göttingen , at Cornell University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1935 he received his doctorate from MIT in physics with John C. Slater ("Quantum mechanical study of multiple ionization collisions of a fast electron with an atom"). He then worked at Stanford University and during World War II in research for the US Navy and in Los Alamos , where he became head of the theory department after the war and was involved in the hydrogen bomb project under Edward Teller . From 1954 he was head of the data center and later professor at New York University , at whose Courant Institute he was from 1953. From 1964 he was professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where he retired in the early 1980s. He then taught gifted students for six years, for which he received an award from the US school authorities in 1987.

He played the violin since his youth, and later with the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra . Richtmyer spoke German, French and Russian.

He was married twice, first marriage from 1938 to Georgia Foster, which ended in divorce, and second marriage from 1953 to Jane Perry, who died in 1979. He had two daughters and an adopted son.

plant

The Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in gas or hydrodynamics is named after him, when a shock wave hits the interface between two differently dense gases, which leads to turbulence that sometimes looks like mushroom-shaped clouds.

At the end of the 1940s, he worked with John von Neumann on differential methods for solving differential equations in one-dimensional gas dynamics (her interests lay in explosions and shock waves), the instabilities of which were later recognized by Peter Lax as relics of the numerical method. In 1956, Richtmyer and Lax proved the “Lax equivalence theorem” that a finite linear difference method for a (well-defined) initial value problem of linear partial differential equations converges precisely when it is stable.

In 1990 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for his book on difference methods in initial value problems of differential equations.

Fonts

  • Difference methods for initial value problems , Interscience 1957, 2nd edition with Keith William Morton , New York, 1967, reprint, Krieger 1994, ISBN 0-89464-763-6
  • Principles of Advanced Mathematical Physics , Springer, 2 volumes, 1978, 1986
  • with Arlan Ramsay Introduction to hyperbolic geometry , Springer 1995

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Stanislaw Ulam Adventures of a mathematician
  2. ↑ Teller expressly praises him in “The work of many people”, Science 1955
  3. ^ "Taylor instability in a shock acceleration of compressible fluids," Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, 1960, pp. 297-319. Experimentally found by Meshkov in Russia in 1969
  4. ^ John von Neumann, RD Richtmyer A Method for the Numerical Calculation of Hydrodynamic Shocks , Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 21, 1950, pp. 232-237
  5. ↑ Lax, Richtmyer "Survey of the stability of linear finite difference equations", Comm. Pure Applied Mathematics, Vol. 9, 1956, p. 267
personal data
SURNAME Richtmyer, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Richtmyer, Robert Davis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Ithaca , NY
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 2003
Place of death Gardner , Colorado