Chapman

Sydney Chapman

Born: 29 Jan 1888 in Eccles (near Manchester), England
Died: 16 June 1970 in Boulder, Colorado, USA

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Sydney Chapman studied engineering at Manchester, then mathematics at Cambridge. After graduating in 1910 he worked at the Greenwich Observatory and continued to work there during World War I. He was appointed to the chair of mathematics at Imperial College London in 1924 succeeding Whitehead.

His main area of research was the Earth's magnetic field and for his work in this area he was elected to the Royal Society in 1919, awarded the Society's Copley Medal in 1966. He developed systematic approximations to the Maxwell - Boltzmann formulation for the velocity distribution function for interacting particles under general force laws. He also received the Adams Prize in 1929 and, in 1957, he was president of the Special Commission of the International Geophysical Year.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. V C A Ferraro, Sydney Chapman, Bull. London Math. Soc. 3 (1971), 221-250.
  4. S-I Akasofu, B Fogle and B Haurwitz (eds.), Sydney Chapman, eighty : from his friends (Boulder, Colo., 1968).
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