Love

Augustus Edward Hough Love

Born: 17 April 1863 in Weston-super-Mare, England
Died: 5 June 1940 in Oxford, England

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Love graduated from Cambridge and held the Sedleian chair of natural philosophy at Oxford from 1899. He worked on the mathematical theory of elasticity (on which he wrote the two volume work A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of Elasticity (1892-93)) and on waves. His work on the structure of the Earth Some Problems in Geodynamics won the Adams Prize at Cambridge in 1911.

An expert on spherical harmonics, Love discovered the existence of waves of short wavelength in the Earth's crust. The ideas in this work are still much used in geophysical research and the short wavelength earthquake waves he discovered are called 'Love waves'.

He received many honours, the Royal Society awarded him its Royal Medal in 1909 and its Sylvester Medal in 1937, while the London Mathematical Society awarded him its De Morgan Medal in 1926.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Augustus Edward Hough Love, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 3 (1939-41), 480-482. 
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