Rittner D. A to Z of Scientists in Weather and Climate

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Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project at Los Alamos,

particularly on detonation devices, along with J.

Robert Oppenheimer. In 1938, the American

Mathematical Society awarded him the Maxime

Bôcher Prize for his memoir “Almost periodic

functions and groups.” At the end of the year, in

December, he married again, to Klara Dan; they

lived in Princeton and then later in Georgetown,

Washington, D.C.

After World War II, Neumann turned his

attention to improving the speed of computers

and their ability to perform computations. He is

credited as the first person to endorse publicly the

creation of a computer that had memory capable

of storing programs. In 1944, Neumann and

friend Oskar Morganstern published a book titled

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. They

analyzed such strategy games as poker

, showing

that a “best possible” method of play existed and

could be determined using math. This became

known as game theory and provided ideas and

techniques that could also be applied to eco-

nomic, social, and military problems.

By 1944, he was corresponding with Howard

Aiken (Harvard Mark I), George Stibitz at Bell

Labs, and others, and by a chance meeting with

Herman Goldstine in June, he learned about the

work being done at the Moore School of Elec-

trical Engineering at the University of Pennsyl-

vania. Researchers there were building a

computer called the Electronic Numerical Inte-

grator and Computer (ENIAC) that could per-

form more than 300 multiplications per second.

Neumann received clearance in September to

visit the school and quickly became a consultant

to the project. He immediately began to re-

search for an improved computer called the

Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Compu-

ter (EDVAC).

Neumann wrote a 101-page report called the

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945

that described the theory and design of the

EDVAC, informing readers that it would have a

memory and store data and programs. Unfortu-

nately, outsider researchers erroneously believed

that the whole concept was Neumann’s and not

his other colleagues, one of whom had written a

memo detailing the concept six months before

Neumann even heard of ENIAC. Goldstein and

Neumann applied for a patent from the Pentagon

on March 22, 1946, but was refused on the basis

that patents had to be filed within a year after the

appearance of published data.

However, it was Maurice Wilkes, at Cam-

bridge University Mathematical Laboratory, who

conceived his own design for the EDSAC (Elec-

tronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator); that

became the world’s first operational stored-pro-

gram computer. EDSAC performed its first cal-

culation on May 6, 1949.

124 Neumann, John Louis von

John von Neumann. His work on parallel processes and

networks has earned him the label of the “father of the

modern computer.” (Alan Richards, photographer.

Courtesy of the Archives of the Institute for Advanced

Study)

Neumann was awarded the Medal for Merit

and the Distinguished Civilian Service Award in

1946 for his outstanding contributions during

World War II and the Medal of Merit Presiden-

tial Award in 1947. In 1948, Neumann published

Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the

Animal and the Machine, promoting the idea that

electronic “brains” could perfor

m human tasks.

Neumann stayed at Princeton and continued

to work on computer theory, and his research of

stored-program computers, which became univer-

sally adopted, is now an integral part of modern

high-speed digital computers. He convinced

Princeton to allow him to build his own computer,

the IAS (named for his place of research, the

Institute for Advance Study). It was completed in

1951. The following year, he designed MANIAC

1 (mathematical analyzer, numerical integrator,

and computer), a high-speed computer designed

to use a flexible stored program. Historians agree

that his MANIAC was used to produce and test

the world’s first hydrogen bomb in 1952.

From 1948 to 1956, Neumann was supervi-

sor to Jule Gregory

CHARNEY

, who was also a

member of the Institute for Advanced Study in

Princeton. Neumann believed that the goal of

weather prediction should have the highest pri-

ority in the use of his computer. Charney served

as the director of theoretical meteorology for the

AIS group. Using ENIAC and MANIAC, he and

the group constructed a successful mathematical

model of the atmosphere, demonstrating that

numerical weather prediction was both feasible,

although it took 24 hours to generate the forecast

on ENIAC and five minutes on MANIAC. This

satisfied the theories laid down earlier by

BJERK

NES

, L. F.

RICHARDSON

and C. G.

ROSSBY

. Char-

ney went on to help establish a numerical

weather prediction unit within the U.S. Weather

Bureau in 1954.

In October 1954, President Dwight D. Eisen-

hower appointed him a member of the Atomic

Energy Commission (AEC). The AEC, estab-

lished after World War II, was responsible for

developing and producing nuclear weapons and

for regulating the use of atomic power in industry

in the United States, although Neumann was

politically an independent. Neumann’s work also

led to the construction of ORDVAC (ordnance

variable automatic computer), unveiled in 1952.

He was appointed a member of the General

Advisory Committee of the AEC. In 1954, a new

calculator for the navy, NORC (naval ordnance

research computer), was boasted to do a 24-hour

weather prediction in a few minutes. The New

York Herald Tribune (December 3, 1954) also

reported that NO

RC could compute the tidal

motions of the entire Atlantic and Pacific

Oceans; throw new light on the core of the Earth,

believed to be liquid, by computing the turbulent

motion at the center; and help the armed forces

plan the movement of men and material by

mathematically simulating logistical problems.

His later work on parallel processes and net-

works has earned him the label of the “father of

the modern computer.” During the summer of

1954, he learned that he had bone cancer that

may have been the result of exposure to nuclear

radiation during his work at Los Alamos.

In 1956, he received the Albert Einstein

Commemorative Award, the Enrico Fermi Award,

and the Medal for Freedom. Also that year, Neu-

mann, Charney, and others served on a National

Science Foundation committee to develop a

national meteorological policy that would pro-

mote research, education, and professionalism. In

1960, the National Center for Atmospheric

Research, NCAR, was established. Even near

death, he met with scientists and government offi-

cials on the issue of the AEC at his hospital bed-

side. On February 8, 1957, Neumann died from

cancer at the age of 53. He is considered one of

the greatest minds of the 20th century.

Besides his awards and medals, he received

honorary doctoral degrees from Princeton

(1947), Harvard University (1949), Istanbul

University, Turkey (1952), University of Munich,

Germany (1953), and Columbia University

Neumann, John Louis von 125

(1954). He was a member of many professional

societies: American Mathematical Society (pres-

ident 1950–51), the National Academy of Sci-

ences (1937–57), American Philosophical

Society, Mathematical Association of America,

American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

Academiz Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Lima,

Peru; Acamedia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome,

Italy; Instituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere

(Milan, Italy); Royal Netherlands Academy of

Sciences and Letters, Amsterdam, Netherlands;

and Information Processing Hall of Fame, Info-

mart, Dallas TX, 1985.

5 Newton, Sir Isaac

(1643–1727)

English

Mathematician, Physicist

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in

oolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, to Isaac Newton, a

farmer who died three months before the famed

mathematician was born, and Hannah Ayscough.

She later remarried to Barnabas Smith, the min-

ister of a church at nearby North Witham, when

Newton was two years old, and his grandmother

Margery Ayscough at Woolsthorpe raised him.

Although Newton was destined to become one of

the greatest scientists of all time, he was consid-

ered a controversial figure in his day due to his

relationships with his peers.

Newton first lived with his mother and an

extended family after his stepfather died in 1653.

He attended the Free Grammar School in Gran-

tham but showed little enthusiasm for academics

and was taken out to run his mother’s estate.

That also proved of no interest to him. He

returned to the Grammar School in 1660, on the

convincing of an uncle, to finish and attend a

university. Newton entered Trinity College Cam-

bridge in 1661.

Newton studied

ARISTOTLE

, Descartes, Gas-

sendi, Hobbes, Boyle,

GALILEO

, and Kepler but it

was clear that he was forming his own ideas at an

early age. He also began to read many of the math

books of the time. He received his bachelor’s

degree in 1665 and returned to Lincolnshire when

a plague closed down the university that summer.

Returning later for a master’s degree, Newton was

elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and

when his teacher Isaac Barrow resigned from the

Lucasian Professor chair in 1669, Newton took it

over on Barrow’s recommendation.

Newton’s first task was to work in the field of

optics. It was widely held that white light was a

single entity, but Newton had decided that it was

not, based on chromatic aberration he found in a

telescope lens. Newton conducted an experiment

of passing a thin beam of sunlight through a glass

prism and observing the resulting spectrum of

colors. He argued that white light was made up of

different types of tiny corpuscles that refracted at

different angles and that each produced a differ-

126 Newton, Sir Isaac

Sir Isaac Newton. Controversial but brilliant, Newton is

given credit for founding the laws of gravity, inventing a

new type of telescope, and spending his later years in

politics. (Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

ent color. Opposed to the construction of refract-

ing telescopes because he erroneously thought

that all refracting lenses would have chromatic

aberration, he instead designed a reflecting tele-

scope in 1672, to this day called a Newtonian. He

also invented the sextant, which was rediscov-

ered by John Hadley and Thomas Godfrey inde-

pendently of each other in 1731.

In 1672, Newton was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society and published his first scientific

paper on light and color in their Philosophical

ransactions of the Royal Society. Robert

HOOKE

and Christiaan Huygens, however, disagreed that

light was the motion of small particles: this began

the lifelong feud between Newton and Hooke. To

compound the feud, in 1675, Hooke argued that

Newton had stolen some of his conclusions

regarding light, so Newton waited until Hooke

died in 1703 before he published his Opticks

(1704). It was not until the 19th century that the

wave theory for light, an explanation of optical

phenomena, was revived by scientists such as

François Arago, Augustin Fresnel, James Clerk

MAXWELL

, and Heinrich

HERTZ

. In 1678, New-

ton suffered the first of two nervous breakdowns

as a result of arguments with English Jesuits in

Liège who disagreed with his theory of color.

Newton’s greatest achievement is his theory

of universal gravitation: “All matter attracts all

other matter with a force proportional to the

product of their masses and inversely propor-

tional to the square of the distance between

them.” In 1687, Newton published Principia, or

Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Math-

ematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which

some historians proclaim is the greatest scientific

book ever published. His physics not only applied

to celestial bo

dies but was also relevant to the tra-

jectory of projectiles, pendulums, and free fall

such as the proverbial apple falling from the tree.

In Principia, he demonstrated that the planets are

attracted toward the Sun and that all celestial

dies mutually attract each other. Newton went

on to explain the eccentric orbits of comets, tides

and their variations, the precession of the Earth’s

axis (the Earth’s axis rotates [precesses] just like a

spinning top. The period of precession is about

26,000 years), and lunar motion as it is affected

by the Sun’s gravity. Volume I of Principia lays the

framework for the science of mechanics, while

volume II puts forth the theory of fluids, and vol-

ume III describes the law of gravity

After the crowning of William and Mary in

1689, Newton was elected to Parliament for his

staunch stand against making universities

Catholic (he was Protestant). Shortly after, in

1693, Newton suffered his second nervous break-

down, left Cambridge (finally resigning in 1701),

and took a government job in London, becoming

warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 and master in

1699. Now quite wealthy, Newton concentrated

on the issues of the mint, dealing with coinage

and preventing counterfeiting. He was again

elected to Parliament in 1701–02.

In 1703, he was elected president of the

Royal Society and was reelected each year until

his death. In 1705, he was the first scientist ever

knighted and is considered one of the three most

important scientists of all time.

Newton ended his days once again in contro-

versy, this time with Gottfried Wilhelm von Leib-

niz over who invented calculus. As president of

the Royal Society, Newton put together a com-

mittee to arbitrate, but he also wrote anonymously

the official report supporting himself, along with

an anonymous review of it in the Philosophical

ransactions of the Royal Society. He remained mas-

ter of the mint until his death on March 31, 1727,

in London, where he was buried with much pomp

and ceremony in W

estminster Abbey.

Newton, Sir Isaac 127

5 O’Brien, James Joseph Kevin

(1935– )

American

Meteorologist, Physical Oceanographer

James O’Brien was born on August 10, 1935, in

the Bronx, New York, to Maurice O’Brien and

Beatrice Cuddihy

, who met on a boat from Ireland

in 1927. Although Maurice had no education

beyond sixth grade, he was made a metallurgist

technician at Bell Labs because of his cleverness

and eventually moved to their Murray Hill, New

Jersey, labs. As the oldest child in a family of nine

children, James O’Brien loved math and loved to

read. Though he lived in New Providence, he

attended Summit High School in Summit, New

Jersey, where 85 percent of his class went to col-

lege. O’Brien went to Rutgers Men’s College in

1953 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in

chemistry in 1957. He also received a commis-

sion in the U.S. Air Force as a second lieutenant.

He married Sheila O’Keefe, and they had five

children.

O’Brien first worked for E. I. DuPont de

Nemours and Company, Inc., as a chemist in 1957,

until the air force sent him to the University of

Texas at Austin for 12 months to learn meteorol-

ogy. He was then stationed at Bolling Air Force

Base in Washington, D.C., for 15 months as a

weather officer but was discharged early. He went

back to DuPont. In 1962, he moved with his fam-

ily to Texas A&M to get his Ph.D. He completed

both a master’s degree (1964) and Ph.D. (1966) in

meteorology in three years and one semester, a

record that still stands at the university.

While in graduate school at Texas A&M, he

took a statistics course with John Griffiths. As a

result of asking some questions, O’Brien wrote

two papers, “The rank correlation coefficient as

an indicator of the product-moment correlation

coefficient for small samples (10–100),” pub-

lished in the Journal of Geophysical Research

(1965), and “On choosing a test for normality for

small samples,” published in Archiv für Meteoro-

logic, Geophysik und Bioklimatologie (with John F.

Griffiths in 1967). His master’

s degree thesis,

entitled “Investigation of the diabatic wind pro-

file in the atmospheric boundary layer,” was pub-

lished in the Journal of Geophysical Research in

1965. This paper explained the structure of near-

surface wind profiles based on a Russian theory

O’Brien has held several positions, including

Advanced Study Group Fellow and research sci-

entist at the National Center for Atmospheric

Research, in Boulder, Colorado (1966–68). From

1969 to the present, he has held positions at

Florida State University as first associate pro-

fessor and then professor of meteorology and

129

oceanography. He currently is the Robert O.

Lawton Distinguished Professor of meteorology

and oceanography and director of the Center for

Ocean–Atmospheric Prediction Studies.

In the field of meteorology, he was the first

to study the effect of a hurricane on the ocean,

and this started an entire field of study. He dis-

covered the way to calculate vertical velocity

from typical atmospheric wind profiles soundings

and has more than 4,000 citations proving that

this is the way to do it. He has determined how

to calculate the vertical profile of horizontal

eddy diffusivity and now has more than 2,000

citations. This idea is even used in the National

Center for Atmospheric Research ocean model

to handle convection in the ocean.

He has created a number of models of El

Niño, among them a model that demonstrated

Klaus

WYRTKI

’s ideas of how Kelvin Waves from

the western Pacific create El Niño in the eastern

equatorial Pacific; a real model of El Niño show-

ing how real winds give the amplitude and phase

of all Los Niño’s; and effective forecast models of

El Niño. Other discoveries include reology, or the

stress-strain relationship of marginal ice zones

that shows why the marginal ice zone is thin and

how ice-edge upwelling occurs, and ENSO (El

Niño—Southern Oscillation) impacts over the

United States (tornadoes, hurricanes, snow,

floods, and high winds) through a series of papers

written jointly with his students finding ENSO

signals in the historical climate records.

O’Brien is a Fellow of the American Associ-

ation for the Advancement of Science (1988),

American Geophysical Union (1987), Ameri-

can Meteorological Society (1981), and Royal

Meteorological Society (1983); a Foreign Fellow,

of the Russian Academy of Natural Science

(1994); and a member of the Oceanographical

Society of Japan, The Norwegian Academy of

Science and Letters, and other societies. His

numerous awards and citations include the

Medal of Honor of Liège University, Belgium

(1978); Sverdrup Gold Medal in Air–Sea Inter-

action (1987); ONR Distinguished Ocean Edu-

cator (1989); and Medal of Honor, Ocean

University of Quindao, China (1999). He is the

author of more than 200 scientific papers and

reports and has served as associate editor for

Monthly Weather Review (1992–97); Continental

Shelf Research (1986– ); and for International

Journal of Math and Computer Modeling (1984– ).

He has been a member of numerous committees

and panels and reviewer for a number of scien-

tific organizations.

O’Brien has trained 34 Ph.D. students, 45

master’

s degree students in meteorology and phys-

ical oceanography, and more than 25 postdoctoral

130 O’Brien, James Joseph Kevin

James Joseph Kevin O’Brien. In the field of meteorology,

he was the first to study the effect of a hurricane on

the ocean, and this started an entire field of study.

(Courtesy of James Joseph Kevin O’Brien)

students. He and his students have convinced the

field that isopycnal vertical coordinates or con-

stant density surfaces are the only way to under-

stand the ocean.

O’Brien’s major contributions, however, are

in solving the vertical velocity problem and the

ENSO problem, which is the vertical motion of

the air or water that is important for rain or life.

It is very small and hard to measure directly. His

formulae give good estimates. The understanding

of the fluid dynamics of ENSO events has led to

an ability to forecast El Niño and La Niña several

months in advance. He is continuing his work as

professor of meteorology and oceanography, at

the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction

Studies at Florida State University.

O’Brien, James Joseph Kevin 131

5 Philander, S. George H.

(1942– )

South African

Oceanographer

George Philander was born in South Africa to

Peter and Alice Philander

, both high school

teachers. Philander attended a segregated school

during this time of apartheid; however, when he

attended the University of Cape Town, it was not

segregated and he received his B.A. there in

applied mathematics in 1962. He then moved on

to Harvard, where he obtained his Ph.D. in

applied mathematics in 1970. He married Hilda

Storari, a meteorologist from Argentina whom he

met in graduate school; they have one son.

After accepting a postdoctoral fellow posi-

tion at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT) in 1970–71, Philander became a research

associate in the geophysical fluid dynamics pro-

gram at Princeton University, New Jersey, from

1971 to 1977, serving as a consultant to the

World Meteorological Organization in Geneva,

Switzerland, for a year (1973–74). From 1978 to

1989, he was a senior research oceanographer in

the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-

istration (Princeton, New Jersey). By 1990, Phi-

lander was back at Princeton University as a

professor of geological and geophysical sciences

and from 1994 to 2001 was chairman of the

department.

Philander’s contributions have been mostly

in oceanography and in the field of ocean–atmo-

sphere interactions, which concern phenomena

such as the Southern Oscillation between com-

plementary El Niño and La Niña states. (He

introduced the latter term). He contributed sig-

nificantly to the development of computer mod-

els that simulate the oceanic circulation, the

counterparts of the models used to predict

weather.

He has served on a number of committees

and panels and has authored more than 100 sci-

entific publications including papers, chapters for

several books, and two books dealing with the

issue of global warming: El Niño, La Niña and the

Southern Oscillation, (1990) and Is the Temperature

Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global W

arming

(1998). The first is intended for researchers in the

field of ocean–atmosphere interactions. The sec-

ond, intended for lay readers, explains some of

the physical and chemical processes that make

ours a habitable planet and explores the likely

consequences of the current rapid rise in the

atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

Philander has received a number of awards

including NOAA Environmental Research Lab-

oratories, Distinguished Authorship Award (1979

and 1983), the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the

133