Vilhelm Bjerknes

Vilhelm Frimann Koren Bjerknes

Born: 14 March 1862 in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway
Died: 9 April 1951 in Oslo, Norway

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Vilhelm Bjerknes was a son of Carl Bjerknes and worked with his father on hydrodynamic research until his final year of study at university. He then went to Paris where he attended Poincaré's lectures on electrodynamics, then he went to Bonn as Hertz's assistant.

Later Vilhelm Bjerknes became professor at Stockholm and continued developing his father's ideas but also making other significant advances, generalising results of Thomson and Helmholtz. He later accepted chairs at several universities (Christiania, Leipzig, Bergen and, in 1926, Oslo) by this time working on his other major topic of dynamic meteorology. Most of his major results in this area appear in On the Dynamics of the Circular Vortex with Applications to the Atmosphere and to Atmospheric Vortex and Wave Motion (1921).

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. T Bergeron, Vilhelm Bjerknes, Smaskrifter udgivet af Universitet i Bergen II (1962), 7-30.
  4. R M Friedman, Appropriating the weather : Vilhelm Bjerknes and the construction of a modern meteorology (Ithaca, 1989).
  5. E Gold, Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 7 (1950-51), 303-317. 
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