Pioneer Scientists
Prof. Chaim L. Pekeris
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Prof. Chaim Leib Pekeris was born in 1908 in Lithuania. At an extremely early age he exhibited his brilliance. By the age of 16 he was teaching mathematics at his high school. An acquaintance, Max Baker, had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States and had settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was successful in the furniture business, and was able to help Chaim and his two brothers come to the United States for their continuing education. In addition, the prominent New England merchant and philanthropist, Edward Max Chase, came to the assistance of the Pekeris brothers. He, too, was an immigrant from Lithuania. He provided the young men with immigration affidavits, helped them find employment, and paid some of their tuition expenses. Pekeris entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925. At first he majored in mathematics but changed to meteorology, and graduated with the BSc degree in 1929. At that time meteorology was just being established at MIT, and was a program administered within the Department of Aeronautical Engineering in the School of Engineering. He stayed at MIT for his graduate studies, and became a student of Carl-Gustav Rossby. He graduated with his doctoral degree in 1933. It was the custom at MIT before WWII that doctoral graduates in the School of Science received the PhD degree, and those in the School of Engineering received the ScD degree; thus, Pekeris received his ScD. The title of his ScD thesis is: The Development and Present Status of the Theory of the Heat Balance in the Atmosphere. During his time as a graduate student, Pekeris won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and studied in Oslo with some of the eminent meteorologists of the era. He was also an Assistant Meteorologist at MIT. However, upon graduation he accepted an appointment as Assistant Geophysicist in the Department of Geology at MIT. Pekeris won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1934. In the later decade of the 1930s Pekeris established his reputation in theoretical geophysics, and made creative contributions to astrophysics and hydrodynamics. As the world entered WWII, Pekeris began his work on the propagation of pulses, and on the inverse problem of electrical resistivity. The former became important in the development of research in SONAR and infrasound, and the latter was, of course, commercially applicable as well as being intellectually stimulating. Pekeris’ great productivity led to his promotion to Associate Geophysicist at MIT in 1936. During WWII from 1941-45, Pekeris was involved in military research. He worked as a member of the Division of War Research at the Hudson Laboratories of Columbia University, and devoted his time to acoustic pulse and wave propagation studies. In the years 1945-50 he was the Director of the Mathematical Physics Group. Within that period he also had an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. Shortly after WWII Pekeris’ wartime research was recognized by the US Navy with the title Honorary Admiral. In the 1940s as he re-entered academic life following WWII, Pekeris published several studies of microwave propagation, and began his work on atomic physics. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Chaim Weizmann, the first President, asked Pekeris to come to the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS), and to be the founder of its Department of Applied Mathematics. Pekeris negotiated that WIS would build a digital computer for the new department. He then agreed to join WIS, and moved to Rehovot in 1950. The computer was called WEIZAC (WEIZmann Automatic Computer). The WEIZAC was built during 1954-55. It is an early example of successful technology transfer, with the design of the von Neumann machine moving from the Institute for Advanced Study to WIS in Rehovot. WEIZAC’s existence, its intense application to physical problems, and the cadres trained in digital hardware, software, and computational methods opened up a market of concepts and practices outside of the United States and Europe. The primary ostensible reason to build WEIZAC was to solve Laplace’s tidal equations for the Earth’s oceans with realistic geographical boundaries. However, Pekeris insisted that the entire scientific community of Israel should have access to the WEIZAC. One of Pekeris’ first activities in Israel was the organization and management of Israel’s first geophysical survey. This activity led to the discovery of oil near Heletz, northwest of the Negev. It also led to the establishment of the Institute of Petroleum Research and Geophysics. As the 1950s drew to a close, Pekeris and his students entered a new area of theoretical seismology, to compute synthetic seismograms for layered media by using generalized ray theory. The use of generalized ray theory is computationally quite intensive, and the use of WEIZAC, and subsequently the more powerful GOLEM, was crucial to the success of this effort. WIS built GOLEM I in 1964 and GOLEM II in 1972. ‘Golem’ is Hebrew for shapeless man, and descends from a legend about Prague’s Rabbi Loew in the 16th Century CE, who is said to have made a Golem from a lump of clay. In computer science the Golem is a symbol for artificial intelligence. During the Cold War years many Jews were still living behind the Iron Curtain. Many of Pekeris’ distant relatives were in this category as were those of his colleagues. Exit visas could be obtained, but the cost was prohibitive for most would-be émigrés. Pekeris and his wife were untiringly selfless in helping many of these people leave Eastern Europe and come to Israel. The decade of the 1960s initiated more papers about the lower energy states of helium and lithium, and also a series of papers on Laplace’s tidal equations. In 1969 Pekeris was the first to numerically solve these equations of the world’s oceans. Pekeris had an outstanding international reputation in theoretical and computational geophysics. He was a major participant in the first meeting of the Committee on Geophysical Theory and Computers (1964 in Moscow and Leningrad), and was the host for the second meeting the following year in Rehovot. In addition to his major contributions to the study of the Earth’s tides, Pekeris had renewed his interest in geophysical inverse problems, and this subject was one of the themes of the meeting. The Committee on Geophysical Theory and Computers was sponsored by the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. By 1973 WIS had established a Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science that included the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Pekeris was considered to be the founding father of that Faculty. As a widely respected senior scientist, Pekeris began to receive formal recognition for his many contributions and accomplishments. In 1972 he was elected a Foreign Member (Socio Straniero) of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and in 1974 he received Columbia University‘s Vetlesen Prize. In 1980 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him its Gold Medal, and in 1981 received the Israel Prize. By 1990 the Committee on Geophysical Theory and Computers had been renamed the Committee on Mathematical Geophysics, computers having become so ubiquitous. The meeting that year was held in Jerusalem to honor Pekeris for his many exceptional contributions. In 1973 Prof. Pekeris retired at age 65; he passed away in 1993. He was hailed as a major figure in the physical sciences and in the history of the State of Israel. The following year the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science established the Pekeris Memorial Lecture, which is presented annually. |
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| Fields of Research · Theoretical and computational geophysics
· Quantum theory, of two atom molecules, and the theory of the earth's magnetic field
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Free oscillation
of the earth
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Developing computers |
Professor Pekeris’ dominant scientific work was almost always based on computational methods for solving physical problems. For that, computer usage is essential. Professor Pekeris' research achievements were many and vast, and included studies in convection within the earth, propagation of sound in layered media and in the computation of tides on a global scale, in particular the oceans. For all of his contributions he was awarded an honorary Admiral rank in the United States Navy. Prof. Pekeris’ list of researched areas during his lifetime is substantial and profound. However, his work on the modes of free oscillation of the earth is considered fundamental and classic. Professor Pekeris calculated the frequencies at which the earth vibrates by earthquakes. These calculations, the most detailed of their kind, provided as well the ability to differentiate between a real earthquake and a human-made, underground nuclear explosion. Already in 1952, Professor Pekeris was the first Israeli to have ever been elected to the United States National Academy of Science. He was also elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1961. |
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| Selected Awards and Honorary Degrees | ||
1952 Elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences 1957 Weizmann Prize 1966 Rothschild Prize in Mathematics 1972 Elected foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1974 Vetlesen Prize in Geophysics 1980 Awarded a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain 1981 Israel Prize in Physics |
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| Selected Publications | ||
| Link to Scopus Database |
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| Documents Preserved at the WIS Archives | ||
| Prof. Pekeris’ archive, including documents, letters, protocols, lectures, scientific documentation, newspaper notes, photos and multimedia, is treasured and preserved at the Weizmann Institute Archives. |
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| Selected Archival Documents | ||
Congratulations from Henry Polack on receiving the Rothschild Prize, 1966 |
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| An Invitation to The Vetlesen Prize Award Dinner in honor of Prof. Pekeris, 1974 | ||
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| A letter from RAS announcing the Gold Medal award of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1980 | ||
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Selected
Bibliography |
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| The Vetlesen Prize Web Site, Chaim Leib Pekeris | ||
| G. Freeman. Chaim Leib Pekeris, Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 85 (217228), 2004 | ||
| J. Itzikowitz. Compilation: Prof. C. L. Pekeris | ||
