Person: Murnaghan, Francis Dominic
Francis Dominic Murnaghan was an Irish mathematician who worked in the application of group theory to continuum mechanics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents, Angela Mooney and George Murnaghan, were Roman Catholics although George had been educated at a Protestant school.
- Harry Bateman had been appointed there in 1912 and his interests in partial differential equations fitted perfectly with Murnaghan's interests at the time.
- Arriving at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Murnaghan began doctoral studies working on differential equations which arose in the study of radio-active decay.
- In 1916 Murnaghan submitted his thesis The Lines of Electric Force Due to a Moving Electron and was awarded his Ph.D. Following this he was appointed as a lecturer at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas.
- Murnaghan helped supervise the studies of the first Ph.D. produced by the Rice Institute, namely Hubert Evelyn Bray whose thesis A Green's Theorem in Terms of Lebesgue Integrals was submitted in 1918, the year Murnaghan left.
- In 1928 Frank Morley retired as Head of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins, and Murnaghan was appointed as Professor and Head of the Mathematics Department.
- Let us now examine the mathematics which interested Murnaghan.
- Over the period up to 1936, in addition to the major texts we have already mentioned, Murnaghan undertook research and published papers on a wide variety of topics such as electrodynamics, relativity, tensor analysis, elasticity, dynamics, aerodynamics, quantum mechanics, and celestial mechanics.
- Although we have mentioned six books by Murnaghan, this is less than half his total of books since he published 16 in all.
- As a teacher, Murnaghan certainly appears to have had great style.
Born 4 August 1893, Omagh, Co. Tyrone, Ireland. Died 24 March 1976, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Ireland
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
