Carl Anton Bjerknes

Carl Anton Bjerknes (1825 to 1903) was a Norwegian mathematician and physicist whose early work was in pure mathematics but who is principally known for his studies in hydrodynamics. Born in Oslo, he studied mining at the University of Oslo and then mathematics at the University of Göttingen and the University of Paris, where he was a pupil of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Gabriel Lamé and Augustin-Louis Cauchy. He held a chair of applied mathematics in 1866 and one of mathematics in 1869, and over fifty years taught at the University of Oslo and the military college. For the rest of his life he tried to explain Maxwell's electrodynamics, and gravitation, through hydrodynamical analogies; he did not succeed in explaining all of it, but his findings were important. With his son Vilhelm Bjerknes he showed pulsating-sphere instruments at the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris and received a diplôme d'honneur. In 1880 he published a life of Niels Henrik Abel. He died of a stroke in 1903, aged 77.