A Bracing Nonlinear Walk in Applied Mechanics: Memoirs and Reflections

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 2130035
Author(s):  
J. Michael T. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Nonlinear Phenomena ◽  
Tipping Points ◽  
Applied Mechanics ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
Shell Buckling ◽  
Biographical Memoir ◽  
University College ◽  
University College London ◽  
Young Researchers

This article is an informal auto-biographical memoir by Mike Thompson, reflecting in retirement on his scientific researches in nonlinear phenomena, wandering pictorially from shell buckling, through bifurcations and chaos to climate tipping points. Some ideas and advice to young researchers are offered whenever it seems appropriate. Two research groups at University College London, and their two IUTAM Symposia are given some prominence, as are the ten years editing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

scholarly journals George Barker Jeffery, 1891-1957

1958 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 128-137 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Applied Mathematics ◽  
London Mathematical Society ◽  
First Year ◽  
Conscientious Objector ◽  
Active Service ◽  
University College ◽  
University College London ◽  
Short Time

George Barker Jeffery was born on 9 May 1891. He came from a Quaker family, and remained a Quaker all his life. He was educated at Strand School, King’s College, and Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell. In 1909 he entered University College, London, to begin a course, common at that time, of two years at the college to be followed by one year’s training as a teacher. He was not an entrance scholar, but his work in mathematics showed so much promise that he was elected to a scholarship in mathematics at the end of his first year. In 1911 he entered the London Day Training College for his teacher’s training. It was there that he met Elizabeth Schofield, whom he married in 1915. However he had already commenced mathematical research, and he read his first paper (1)* before the Royal Society in June 1912, the month following his twenty-first birthday. His later career showed how great an impression had been made upon him by his year’s training as a teacher. However, after it was over he returned to University College as a research student and assistant to L. N. G. Filon, who was then Professor of Applied Mathematics. He always had a great admiration for Filon, though this was not uncritical, as is shown by the obituary notices which he later wrote for the Royal Society, the London Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association. In 1914 Filon went away on active service, and Jeffery, aged 23, was left in charge of the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 1916 he was elected a Fellow of University College. However, as a Quaker he had a conscientious objection to performing military service, so that he could not do this, nor was he allowed to remain at the college. In 1916 he spent a short time in prison as a ‘conscientious objector’, though later he was allowed to undertake ‘work of national importance’. In 1919, when the war was over, he returned to the college, again as an assistant to Filon. In spite of all the difficulties of the war period he had, as the list of his publications shows, maintained a steady output of original work. In 1921 he was promoted to the grade of University Reader in Mathematics.

scholarly journals Advice to a young researcher: with reminiscences of a life in science

2013 ◽  
Vol 371 (1993) ◽  
pp. 20120425 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael T. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Young Researcher ◽  
Research Career ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
University College ◽  
Engineering Department ◽  
Part Time ◽  
University College London ◽  
Young Researchers

This paper provides an informal guide to young researchers in science and engineering as they progress for their first 10 or so years from the time that they first started thinking about doing a PhD. This advice is drawn, with examples and anecdotes, from my own research career which started at the Cambridge Engineering Department in 1958, and progressed through 48 years at University College London to a part-time chair that I now hold in Aberdeen. I hope it may encourage and help tomorrow's scientists on whom the Earth's future very much depends.

scholarly journals Charles Arthur Lovatt Evans, 1884-1968

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 233-252 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Home Life ◽  
University College ◽  
University College London

Charles Lovatt Evans, Emeritus Professor of Physiology, University of London, and a former Vice-President of the Royal Society, died on 29 August 1968, at the age of 84, at his home at Winterslow, near Salisbury. He was the foremost pupil and a lifelong associate of E. H. Starling, Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London, and eventually occupied the same chair. Lovatt Evans was born in Birmingham and spent the whole of his childhood and early manhood there. His father Charles Evans taught music— piano and violin—and was a man of many interests, of which ancient history was one, and he started to learn Greek when in his sixties. Although a humorist he had somewhat rigid views on religion, life and death, and held the view that the more you do for people the less they do for themselves, so Lovatt Evans was largely left to himself to decide upon his future and surmount the difficulties of finding ways and means. His mother seemed to him to be of rather an aloof nature, spending much of her time in intellectual pursuits often at the expense of her domestic duties. The result was that in his home life he was lonely.

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