Robert Simpson Woodward

Robert Simpson Woodward (July 21, 1849 – June 29, 1924) was an American civil engineer, astronomer, physicist, mathematician, geologist, and geographer. He was elected in 1885 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1896 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and in 1902 to the American Philosophical Society. Woodward served a two-year term from 1899 to 1900 as president of the American Mathematical Society, a one-year term in 1900 as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and from December 1904 to January 1921 as president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Quotes

• Closely related to the questions of secular contraction and the mechanics of crust movements are those vexed question of earthquakes, volcanism, the liquidity or solidity of the interior, and the rigidity of the earth's mass as a whole—all questions of the greatest interest, but still lingering on the battle-fields of scientific opinion.
  • "The Mathematical Theories of the Earth: Address Before the Section of Mathematics and Astronomy, American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Toronto Meeting, August 1889". Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 38. 1890. pp. 49–69.  (quote from p. 65; 1889 offprint; also published in Science, 6 September 1889, vol. 344, pp. 167–172)

• Since the beginning of the eighteenth century almost every mathematician of note has been a contributor to or an expositor of the theory of probability. Nicolas, Daniel, and John Bernoulli, Simpson, Euler, d’Alembert, Bayes, Lagrange, Lambert, Condorcet, and Laplace are the principal names which figure in the history of the subject during the hundred years ending with the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Of contributions from this brilliant array of mathematical talent, the Théorie Analytique des Probabilities of Laplace is by far the most profound and comprehensive. It is, like his Mécanique Celeste in dynamical astronomy, still the most elaborate treatise on the subject.
  • Probability and Theory of Errors. Issue 7 of Mathematical Monographs (4th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. 1906. pp. 8–9.  (47 pages; 1st published as a chapter in Higher Mathematics, published in 1896 by John Wiley & Sons)

• The path described by a body falling freely from a considerable height above the surface of the earth presents a problem of interest alike to the mathematical and to the experimental physicist. The former sees in it a capital application of the principles of “relative motion” and the latter sees in it a promising way of demonstrating the rotation of the earth. It has attracted perennial attention for more than a century and has frequently been referred to in this journal during the past decade.
  The mechanical aspects of this problem were first carefully considered by Gauss and Laplace one hundred and ten years ago. Gauss’s equations of motion for a falling body were furnished in a letter to Benzenberg, who was interested especially in the proper interpretation of experimental results. Gauss’s solution is now accessible in the fifth volume of his collected works. He concluded that in addition to the obvious easterly deviation there should be a small meridional deviation toward the equator from the plumb line defined by a bob suspended from the initial position of the body and normal to some plane of reference below. It seems probable that this latter conclusion prompted Laplace to reinvestigate the subject, for he published a very remarkable paper in May, 1803, in the Bulletin de la Société philomatique de Paris …
  • (5 September 1913) "The orbits of freely falling bodies". Science 38 (975): 315–319. DOI:10.1126/science.38.975.315.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Robert Simpson Woodward on Wikipedia