George Ridsdale Goldsbrough

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

FRS (19 May 1881,

Sunderland, Tyne and Wear Sunderland () is a port city in Tyne and Wear, England. It is the City of Sunderland's administrative centre and in the historic county of Durham. The city is from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is on the River Wear's mouth to the North Sea. The ri ...

– 26 May 1963,

Stratford-upon-Avon Stratford-upon-Avon (), commonly known as just Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is situated on the River Avon, north-we ...

) was an English mathematician and mathematical physicist. After education at Bede Higher Grade School, Goldsbrough matriculated at Armstrong College (which in 1963 became a component of

Newcastle University Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public university, public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is ...

) and graduated there with honours in 1903. From 1905 to 1919 he was the senior mathematics master at Jarrow-on-Tyne, Secondary School. In 1910 in conversation, R. A. Sampson suggested that Goldsbrough should do research on the theory of tides and gravitational astronomy. During the First World War, he worked at the

HM Factory, Gretna H.M. Factory, Gretna was the United Kingdom's largest cordite factory in World War I. The government-owned facility was adjacent to the Solway Firth, near Gretna, Dumfries and Galloway. It was built by the Ministry of Munitions in response to ...

, at their

Dornock Dornock is a small Scottish village in Dumfries and Galloway, situated about west of Eastriggs and east of Annan. Dornock is built on land which is above sea level. Dornock Burn runs east of the village and the railway between Annan and ...

site, and is recorded on the Dornock Souvenir held at the Devils Porridge Museum in

Eastriggs Eastriggs is a small village located in Dumfries and Galloway in the south of Scotland, the village is located around north of the mud and sandbanks of the channel of the River Eden, which extends west into the Solway Firth. Travelling by roa ...

. At Armstrong College, Goldsbrough was appointed in 1919 Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, in 1922 Reader in Dynamical Astronomy, and in 1928 Second Professor of Mathematics. (In 1937 Armstrong College became part of King's College, Durham.) At King's College, as the successor to T. H. Havelock, he became in 1942 Head of the Department of Mathematics and remained so until his retirement in 1948. In 1897 and 1898, Sydney Samuel Hough published a mathematical analysis of tides in a global ocean of nearly uniform depth without land masses. In 1915 Goldsbrough improved upon Hough's analysis by publishing a dynamic theory of tides in a polar basis and, in a separate paper, a dynamical theory of tides in a global zonal ocean basin bounded by a land mass at a higher latitude and a land mass at a lower latitude. In 1950 he published a method for solving the dynamical equations of the tides on a rotating globe with ocean boundaries along meridian boundaries. In September 1933 and January 1935, Goldsbrough published two papers on steady ocean circulation that incorporated the variation of the

Coriolis parameter The Coriolis frequency ''ƒ'', also called the Coriolis parameter or Coriolis coefficient, is equal to twice the rotation rate ''Ω'' of the Earth multiplied by the sine of the latitude \varphi. :f = 2 \Omega \sin \varphi.\, The rotation rate ...

with latitude. These two papers anticipated, to some extent, Rossby's 1939 planetary wave theory,

Sverdrup In oceanography, the sverdrup (symbol: Sv) is a non- SI metric unit of volumetric flow rate, with equal to . It is equivalent to the SI derived unit cubic hectometer per second (symbol: hm3/s or hm3⋅s−1): 1 Sv is equal to 1 hm3/s. It is used ...

's 1947 theory relating the curl of the wind stress to meridional transport, and Stommel's 1948 theory of the westward intensification of wind-driven ocean currents. Furthering some papers published in 1922, Goldsbrough published in 1941 a detailed analysis of the perturbations of a ring of satellites by an independent satellite. In 1951 he published an analysis of the stability of two rings of particles in orbit around a primary,Goldsbrough, G. R. "The Stability of Saturn's Rings." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 244, no. 874 (1951): 1–17. He died on the 26th May 1963, at the age of 82, while sitting in a deckchair in the gardens adjoining the

Royal Shakespeare Theatre The Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) (originally called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre) is a grade II* listed 1,040+ seat thrust stage theatre owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company dedicated to the English playwright and poet William Shakespe ...

Stratford-on-Avon Stratford-upon-Avon (), commonly known as just Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is situated on the River Avon, north-wes ...

. (

Coventry Evening Telegraph The ''Coventry Telegraph'' is a local English tabloid newspaper. It was founded as ''The Midland Daily Telegraph'' in 1891 by William Isaac Iliffe, and was Coventry's first daily newspaper. Sold for half a penny, it was a four-page broadsheet ne ...

27th May 1963)

Awards and honours

*1929 – F.R.S. *1948 – C.B.E.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldsbrough, George Ridsdale 1881 births 1963 deaths English mathematicians Fellows of the Royal Society Academics of Durham University Alumni of Armstrong College, Durham