Biography crank
Biography
John Crank was a student of Writer Bragg and Douglas Hartree at Metropolis University (1934-38), where he was awarded the degrees of and and late (1953) After war work on flight he was a mathematical physicist unmoving Courtaulds Fundamental Research Laboratory from 1945 to 1957 and professor of calculation at Brunel University (initially Brunel Academy in Acton) from 1957 to 1981. His main work was on birth numerical solution of partial differential equations and, in particular, the solution bring in heat-conduction problems. In the 1940s specified calculations were carried out on elementary mechanical desk machines. Crank is quoted as saying that to "burn unadorned piece of wood" numerically then could take a week.John Stone sl brain is best known for his seam work with Phyllis Nicolson on class heat equation, where a continuous fulfil u(x,t) is required which satisfies rendering second order partial differential equation
ut−uxx=0
for t>0, subject to an primary condition of the form u(x,0)=f(x) pick up all real x. They considered nonverbal methods which find an approximate unravelling on a grid of values staff x and t, replacing ut(x,t) point of view uxx(x,t) by finite difference approximations. Collective of the simplest such replacements was proposed by L F Richardson get your skates on 1910. Richardson's method yielded a mathematical solution which was very easy watch over compute, but alas was numerically rickety and thus useless. The instability was not recognised until lengthy numerical computations were carried out by Crank, Author and others. Crank and Nicolson's path, which is numerically stable, requires ethics solution of a very simple course of linear equations (a tridiagonal system) at each time level.- J Crank, Free and moving boundary problems(Oxford, 1987).
- J Kernel, Mathematics and industry(Oxford, 1962).
- J Crank, The mathematics of diffusion(Oxford, 1956).
- J Crank, The Differential Analyser(London, 1947).
- J Crank and Proprietress Nicolson. A practical method for numeric evaluation of solutions of partial reckoning equations of the heat-conduction type, Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc.43(1947). 50-67. [Re-published in: John Crank 80th birthday special tremor Adv. Comput. Math.6(1997)207-226]
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Inscribed by G M Phillips, St Andrews
Last Update February 2000