Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Chaim Leib Pekeris
Chaim Leib Pekeris
Pages 216-231
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Switzerland Moritz, St. Rutz, by Photo
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The family home was located at 4 Murkiness Street, near the corner with Ozapavitz Street. His older brother died at birth, a very sad event that led his parents to select the name Chaim, meaning life in Hebrew, for their second son.
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Furthermore, the family home was destroyed sometime during World War II. Pekeris, as he was called by all but his most intimate friends, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925.
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Pekeris won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1934 and participated in academic travel and visits for the next two years. At this time Pekeris married Leah Kaplan.
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At the same time Pekeris published his study of thermal convection in the interior of Earth. Thus, well before World War II two young scientists had established part of the theoretical foundation of what would become the theory of plate tectonics.
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In the United States and Canada supporters of the formation of a State of Israel, and Pekeris was one of them, formed a network of bankers, businessmen, farmers, shippers, engineers, and scientists. They would acquire the surplus equipment, move it to a "hachsharah" farm, recondition it, and ship it to a port near Palestine, such as Beirut, and deliver it to the Haganah units of the soon-to-be renamed Israel Defense Force.
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WEIZAC's existence, its intense application to physical problems, and the cadres trained in digital hardware, software, and computational methods opened a market of concepts and practices outside the United States and Europe. The primary ostensible reason to build WEIZAC was to solve Laplace's tidal equations for Earth's oceans with realistic geographical boundaries.
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He received the Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1996. During his transition from the United States to Israel Pekeris published his first research note on the ground state of helium (1950)
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Just after World War II, Slichter and Rossby had tried to establish a geophysical institute at MIT, but administrative resistance led Rossby to go to the University of Chicago to found the Department of Geophysical Sciences. Slichter went to UCLA to become the first permanent director of the Institute of Geophysics.
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By using more than 1,000 basis functions in the variational formulation Pekeris was able to obtain very accurate upper bounds for the lower energy states. Experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory confirmed the computational results.
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, but the use of observed boundary conditions led to a more successful result. By the early 1960s Pekeris had a superb international reputation in theoretical and computational geophysics.
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In 1980 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him its Gold Medal and in 1981 the State of Israel granted him 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.
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Professor Lee Segel of the Weizmann Institute of Science provided most of the bibliography. In particular, I am most grateful to Professor Flavian Abramovici of Tel Aviv University for assistance with family history, activity at WIS, and with the bibliography.
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Stability of laminar flow through a straight pipe of circular cross section to infinitesimal disturbances which are symmetrical about the axis of the pipe.
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Ray theory solution of the problem of propa gation of explosive sound in a layered liquid.
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Solution of the tidal equations for the M2 and S2 tides in the world oceans from a knowledge of the tidal potential alone. Philos.
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