Augustus Edward Hough Love

Augustus Edward Hough Love (1863 to 1940) was an English mathematical physicist, a Fellow of the Royal Society who was best known for his research on the theory of elasticity. He also studied how waves propagate through solids. His work on the structure of the Earth, published as Some Problems of Geodynamics, won him the Adams Prize in 1911 and set out a mathematical model of surface waves that are still called Love waves. He further contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced a set of parameters now known as Love numbers, which describe how the solid Earth deforms under the gravitational pull of the Moon and Sun, the so-called Earth tides. Born in Weston-super-Mare, he died in Oxford in 1940.