Clifford Spear Gardner (January 14, 1924 – September 25, 2013) was an American mathematician specializing in applied mathematics.

Career

Gardner studied at

Phillips Academy ("Not for Self") la, Finis Origine Pendet ("The End Depends Upon the Beginning") Youth From Every Quarter Knowledge and Goodness , address = 180 Main Street , city = Andover , state = Ma ...

and

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he earned his baccalaureate in 1944. In 1953 he earned a PhD from New York University, under the supervision of

Fritz John Fritz John (14 June 1910 – 10 February 1994) was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems. His early work was on the Radon transform and he is remembered for John's equation. He was a 1 ...

. Thereafter he worked at NASA in Langley Field, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of

NYU New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-United States Secretary of the Treasu ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1967 to 1990, when he retired as professor emeritus.. In 1985 he won the Norbert Wiener Prize for his contributions to supersonic aerodynamics and plasma physics. In 2006 he received with Martin Kruskal,

Robert M. Miura Robert M. Miura (September 12, 1938 - November 25, 2018) was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Sciences and of Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, New Jersey. He was formerly a professor in the Depa ...

, and

John M. Greene John Morgan Greene (22 September 1928 – 22 October 2007) was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for his work on solitons and plasma physics. Education After several successes as a high school student in the state m ...

the Leroy P. Steele Prize for their work on the inverse scattering transformation method for the solution of nonlinear differential equations (special soliton modeling equations similar to the

Korteweg de Vries equation Korteweg may refer to: * Diederik Korteweg, a Dutch mathematician * 9685 Korteweg, an asteroid named after Diederik Korteweg See also * Korteweg–de Vries equation {{Disambig ...

). They developed a systematic approach to solving many nonlinear partial differential equations in a way similar to

Fourier analysis In mathematics, Fourier analysis () is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Josep ...

for linear PDEs. Clifford Gardner died September 25, 2013 in Austin, Texas.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gardner, Clifford Spear 1924 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Harvard University alumni New York University alumni 2013 deaths University of Texas at Austin faculty Applied mathematicians Phillips Academy alumni