Howell Peregrine
Encyclopedia
Howell Peregrine was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 applied mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics
Fluid mechanics
Fluid mechanics is the study of fluids and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest; fluid kinematics, the study of fluids in motion; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion...

, especially of free surface flows such as water waves, and coastal engineering.

Education and career

Howell Peregrine joined the Mathematics Department of University of Bristol
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...

 in 1964 following his undergraduate and postgraduate training at Oxford and Cambridge. He spent his entire career at Bristol. One of his most remarkable contributions was the theoretical prediction of a new nonlinear entity, now called the Peregrine soliton
Peregrine soliton
The Peregrine soliton is an analytic solution of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. This solution has been proposed in 1983 by Howell Peregrine, researcher at the mathematics department of the University of Bristol.- Main properties :...

 , that may explain the formation of hydrodynamics rogue waves and that has also been experimentally demonstrated more than 25 years later in the field of nonlinear fiber optics
Nonlinear optics
Nonlinear optics is the branch of optics that describes the behavior of light in nonlinear media, that is, media in which the dielectric polarization P responds nonlinearly to the electric field E of the light...


and then in 2011 in hydrodynamics with experiments in a water wave tank.

He was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Journal of Fluid Mechanics
The Journal of Fluid Mechanics is the leading scientific journal in the field of fluid mechanics. It publishes original work on theoretical, computational and experimental aspects of the subject. The journal is usually referred to by its initials JFM by academics in the field. Within citations,...

 for more than 25 years.

Howell Peregrine died suddenly after a short battle against cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...

. He was then a Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol.

Personal

Peregrine was known to be a good photographer of natural phenomena. Some of the photographs which he took himself appeared in his papers .
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK