Gilbert Walker (physicist) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Gilbert Walker
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Gilbert Thomas Walker
14 June 1868 Rochdale, Lancashire, England
|
| Died | 4 November 1958 (aged 90) |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge Imperial College London |
| Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society Adams Prize (1899) Symons Gold Medal (1934) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Meteorology, Statistician |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge, India Meteorological Department |
Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker CSI FRS (born June 14, 1868 – died November 4, 1958) was an important English scientist. He was a physicist and statistician who lived in the 20th century.
Walker first studied mathematics and used it in many areas. These included how things fly (aerodynamics) and how electricity and magnetism work. He also looked at data that changes over time. Later, he became a teacher at the University of Cambridge. Even though he had no experience with weather, he was asked to join the Indian Meteorological Department. There, he used math to predict the important monsoon rains.
He is famous for explaining the Southern Oscillation. This is a huge natural event that affects weather all over the world. He also discovered something called the Walker circulation, which is named after him. His work greatly helped us understand climate better. He also played a key role in helping the amazing Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, at the start of his career.
Contents
Early Life and School
Gilbert Walker was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, England, on June 14, 1868. He was the fourth child and oldest son of Thomas and Elizabeth Walker. His father, Thomas, was an engineer who helped build reservoirs using concrete.
Gilbert went to Whitgift School and showed a strong interest in math. He won a scholarship to study at St Paul's School. Later, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1889, he was named a "Senior Wrangler," which means he was the top math student in his year.
His hard work sometimes made him sick. He spent several winters getting better in Switzerland. While there, he became a very skilled ice skater. In 1895, he started teaching at Trinity College.
A Career in Weather Science
The first director of the Indian Meteorological Department, Henry Francis Blanford, noticed something interesting. He saw that the summer monsoon in India was connected to how much snow was in the Himalayas in spring. This idea was used to predict the monsoons.
However, by 1892, these predictions started to fail. The next director, John Eliot, tried using other things to predict the weather. These included wind strength and data from Australia and Africa. But Eliot's predictions from 1899 to 1901 were very wrong. There was a drought and famine when he had predicted a lot of rain. Newspapers criticized him a lot. Because of this, weather forecasts were kept secret from 1902 to 1905.
People became more interested in finding patterns in weather. So, Eliot chose Gilbert Walker to be his successor. Walker was a brilliant mathematician, even though he didn't have experience in weather science. In 1903, Walker left his teaching job at Cambridge to work in India. By 1904, he became the director general of observatories in India.
Walker used his strong math skills to improve Blanford's ideas. He created ways to measure how different weather factors were connected over time. He also set up a team of clerks to do these calculations. The math methods he developed for looking at data over time are partly named after him. They are called the Yule-Walker equations.
Over the next 15 years, Walker studied huge amounts of weather data. He looked at information from India and other parts of the world. He was the first to describe a big "seesaw" pattern in the air pressure. This pattern happens between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. He also showed how this pattern was linked to temperature and rainfall across many tropical areas, including India. This important weather pattern is now known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. In 1911, he was honored with the title Companion of the Order of the Star of India.
Other Interests and Discoveries
Gilbert Walker was interested in many different things. He used math to study how birds fly and how boomerangs work. When he was a student, his interest in boomerangs even earned him the nickname "Boomerang Walker." In Shimla, India, he would throw boomerangs, which even caught the attention of the Viceroy of India.
He also studied bird flight and found some mistakes in earlier ideas. He explained that rising warm air (thermals) had enough energy to help birds soar. He also showed how swirling air (turbulent eddies) helped birds lift. He wrote about his ten years of research in the science magazine Nature in 1901.
Walker was also a talented flute player. He was interested in the physics of the flute and knew a lot about its history. He even made some changes to flute designs that were later used in manufacturing. Besides science and music, he was also a watercolor artist. He even had an exhibition of his paintings in Shimla.
Life After India
Walker retired from his work in India in 1924 and was given the title of Knight. He then became a professor of meteorology at Imperial College London. Even after retirement, he continued to study yearly weather and climate changes.
He didn't fully achieve his first goal of perfectly predicting monsoon failures. However, his ideas and research were a huge step forward. They helped future climate scientists move beyond just local weather observations. His work led to the creation of bigger, worldwide models of climate. He was also the president of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1926 to 1927.
In 1904, Walker was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society. This was a big honor, given for his earlier work in applied mathematics and electromagnetism. With his great talent for math, Walker was one of the first to see how brilliant the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was. He wrote a letter to the University of Madras to help Ramanujan get a scholarship.
Walker was interested in many subjects. He noticed that scientists were becoming too focused on just one area. He once said:
There is, to-day, always a risk that specialists in two subjects, using languages full of words that are unintelligible without study, will grow up not only, without knowledge of each other's work, but also will ignore the problems which require mutual assistance.
This means he worried that scientists in different fields might not understand each other. They might also miss important problems that need teamwork to solve.
Gilbert Walker married Mary Constance Carter in 1908. They had a son, Michael Ashley, and a daughter, Verity Micheline. He passed away in Coulsdon, Surrey, on November 4, 1958, at the age of 90. The Walker Institute in the United Kingdom, which studies climate, is named in his honor.
See also
In Spanish: Gilbert Walker para niños
- Centers of action
- Rattleback
- Teleconnection
