Gerald Beresford Whitham. 13 December 1927 — 26 January 2014

Gerald Beresford Whitham was one of the leading applied mathematicians of the twentieth century. His original, deep and insightful research into nonlinear wave propagation formed the foundation of and mathematical techniques for much of the current research in this area. Indeed, many of these ideas and techniques have spread beyond wave propagation research into other areas, such as reaction–diffusion, and has influenced research in pure mathematics. His textbook Linear and nonlinear waves, published in 1974, is still the standard reference for the mathematics of wave motion. Whitham was also instrumental in building from scratch the Department of Applied Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology and, through choosing key people in new, promising research areas, in making it into one of the leading centres of applied mathematics in the world, with an influence far beyond its small size. During his academic career, Whitham received major awards and prizes for his research. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, and was awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize for Applied Mathematics in 1980.

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[9]  G. Whitham.  The flow pattern of a supersonic projectile , 1952 .

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[11]  Nancy Kopell,et al.  Plane Wave Solutions to Reaction‐Diffusion Equations , 1973 .

[12]  J. D. Pearce,et al.  Dispersive dam-break and lock-exchange flows in a two-layer fluid , 2011, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[13]  D. Schwendeman.  A new numerical method for shock wave propagation based on geometrical shock dynamics , 1993, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

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[15]  I. Coddington,et al.  Dispersive and classical shock waves in Bose-Einstein condensates and gas dynamics , 2006 .

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[19]  N. F. Smyth,et al.  Modelling the morning glory of the Gulf of Carpentaria , 2002, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[20]  B. Dubrovin,et al.  Hydrodynamics of weakly deformed soliton lattices. Differential geometry and Hamiltonian theory , 1989 .

[21]  Patrick S. Hagan,et al.  Spiral Waves in Reaction-Diffusion Equations , 1982 .

[22]  Donald S. Cohen,et al.  Rotating Spiral Wave Solutions of Reaction-Diffusion Equations , 1978 .

[23]  B. Sturtevant,et al.  Shock wave focusing using geometrical shock dynamics , 1997 .

[24]  N. F. Smyth,et al.  Hydraulic Jump and Undular Bore Formation on a Shelf Break , 1988 .

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[26]  C. D. Levermore,et al.  The zero dispersion limit for the Korteweg-deVries KdV equation. , 1979, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[27]  E. Blanc,et al.  PROPAGATION OF VERTICAL SHOCK WAVES IN THE ATMOSPHERE , 1994 .

[28]  G. El,et al.  Resolution of a shock in hyperbolic systems modified by weak dispersion. , 2005, Chaos.

[29]  Maxim V. Pavlov,et al.  Nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the bogolyubov-whitham method of averaging , 1987 .

[30]  Nancy Kopell,et al.  Target pattern and spiral solutions to reaction-diffusion equations with more than one space dimension , 1981 .

[31]  M. Hoefer,et al.  Fermionic shock waves: Distinguishing dissipative versus dispersive regularizations , 2013 .

[32]  Panayotis Panayotaros,et al.  Numerical study of a nonlocal model for water-waves with variable depth , 2013 .

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[36]  B. Ton.  Initial boundary-value problems for the Korteweg-de Vries equation , 1977 .

[37]  Lily Elefteriadou.  An Introduction to Traffic Flow Theory , 2013 .

[38]  G. B. Whitham,et al.  The behaviour of supersonic flow past a body of revolution, far from the axis , 1950, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

[39]  A. Gurevich,et al.  Nonstationary structure of a collisionless shock wave , 1973 .

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[41]  Timothy R. Marchant,et al.  The initial boundary problem for the Korteweg-de Vries equation on the negative quarter-plane , 2002, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[42]  Nicholas K. Lowman,et al.  Dispersive shock waves in viscously deformable media , 2013, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[43]  R. Anand,et al.  Shock dynamics of strong imploding cylindrical and spherical shock waves with non-ideal gas effects , 2013, 1306.0661.

[44]  Mathew A. Johnson,et al.  On the modulation equations and stability of periodic generalized Korteweg–de Vries waves via Bloch decompositions , 2010, 1003.3282.

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[48]  Igor Krichever,et al.  Method of averaging for two-dimensional "integrable" equations , 1988 .

[49]  G. Whitham.  A general approach to linear and non-linear dispersive waves using a Lagrangian , 1965, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[50]  V. V. Khodorovskii,et al.  Two-dimensional supersonic nonlinear Schrödinger flow past an extended obstacle. , 2009, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[51]  David W. McLaughlin,et al.  Multiphase averaging and the inverse spectral solution of the Korteweg—de Vries equation , 1980 .

[52]  N. Gershenzon,et al.  Strain waves, earthquakes, slow earthquakes, and afterslip in the framework of the Frenkel-Kontorova model. , 2009, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[53]  Andrea Fratalocchi,et al.  The Whitham approach to dispersive shocks in systems with cubic–quintic nonlinearities , 2012 .

[54]  Simple Diffraction Processes for Nagumo‐ and Fisher‐type Diffusion Fronts , 2001 .

[55]  B. Dubrovin.  Hamiltonian formalism of Whitham-type hierarchies and topological Landau-Ginsburg models , 1992 .

[56]  Sergei Petrovich Novikov,et al.  The periodic problem for the Korteweg—de vries equation , 1974 .

[57]  M. J. Lighthill,et al.  Contributions to the Theory of Waves in Non-linear Dispersive Systems , 1965 .

[58]  P. I. Richards.  Shock Waves on the Highway , 1956 .

[59]  R. W. Means,et al.  Shocklike solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation , 1977 .

[60]  D. Schwendeman.  A numerical scheme for shock propagation in three dimensions , 1988, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

[61]  Accounting for transverse flow in the theory of geometrical shock dynamics , 1993, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

[62]  Mathew A. Johnson,et al.  Whitham averaged equations and modulational stability of periodic traveling waves of a hyperbolic-parabolic balance law , 2010, 1008.4729.