Clifford Truesdell

Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
Born	February 18, 1919(1919-02-18)
Died	January 14, 2000(2000-01-14) (aged 80)
Nationality	USA
Fields	Mathematics Natural Philosophy Polemics
Doctoral advisor	Solomon Lefschetz Harry Bateman
Doctoral students	Walter Noll

Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III (February 18, 1919 – January 14, 2000) was an American mathematician, natural philosopher, historian of science, and polemicist.

Life

Truesdell was born in Los Angeles, California. After high school, he spent two years in Europe learning French, German, and Italian, and improving his Latin and Greek. His linguistic skills stood him in good stead in his later historical investigations. At Caltech he was deeply influenced by the teaching of Harry Bateman. In particular, a course in partial differential equations "taught me the difference between an ordinary good teacher and a great mathematician, and after that I never cared what grade I got in anything."^[1] He obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics and physics in 1941, and an MSc. in mathematics in 1942.

In 1943, he completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University. For the rest of the decade, the U.S. Navy employed him to do mechanics research.

Truesdell taught at Indiana University 1950-61, where his students included James Serrin, Jerald Ericksen, and Walter Noll. From 1961 until his retirement in 1989, Truesdell was professor of rational mechanics at Johns Hopkins University.^[2][3] He and Noll contributed to foundational rational mechanics, whose aim is to construct a mathematical model for treating (continuous) mechanical phenomena.^[4]

Truesdell was the founder and editor-in-chief of the journals Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis and Archive for History of Exact Sciences, which were unusual in several ways. Following Truesdell's criticisms of awkward style in scientific writing,^[5] the journal accepted papers in English, French, German, and Latin.

In addition to his original work in mechanics, Truesdell was a major historian of science and mathematics, editing or co-editing six volumes of the collected works of Leonhard Euler.

Awards

• Euler Medal of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1958 and 1983;
• Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology, 1963;
• Birkhoff Prize of the American Mathematical Society and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1978;
• Theodore von Karman Medal, 1996.

Selected writings

• An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science, Springer-Verlag, 1984.
• A First Course in Rational Continuum Mechanics, Academic Press.
• The Kinematics of Vorticity, 1954.
• Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill.
• The Elements of Continuum Mechanics, Springer-Verlag.
• The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822-1854. ISBN 0387904034. Here is a review by Stuart Antman. Here is another by I. Grattan-Guinness.
• Great Scientists of Old As Heretics in "the Scientific Method". ISBN 0813911346.
• Classical Field Theories of Mechanics, with Toupin, vol. III/1 of Handbuch der Physik edited by Siegfried Flügge.
• "Non-linear Field Theories of Mechanics", with Walter Noll, volume III/3 of Handbuch der Physik edited by Siegfried Flügge.
• An Introduction to the Mechanics of Fluids, with K. R. Rajagopal, Birkhauser, Boston, 1999.
• Essays in the History in Mechanics, Springer-Verlag, 1968.

References

1. ^ Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science (1984) page 422
2. ^ Remembering Clifford Truesdell, from Turin's Accademia delle Scienze
3. ^ Memories of Clifford Truesdell, by Bernard Coleman of Rutgers University.
4. ^ Walter Noll (2003) "The Genesis of Truesdell's Nonlinear Field Theories of Mechanics," Journal of Elasticity 70(1-3): 23-30(8). Also available here.
5. ^ See "A Comment on Scientific Writing" in Truesdell (1984).

Further reading

• Ball, J.M.; and R.D. James (2002) "The Scientific Life and Influence of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III", Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 161: 1–26.
• Becchi, Antonio; Massimo Corradi, Federico Foce, Orietta Pedemonte (2003). Essays on the History of Mechanics: In Memory of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell and Edoardo Benvenuto. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag. ISBN 3-7643-1476-1. 
• Capriz, Gianfranco (2000). "Obituary: Clifford Ambrose Truesdell (1919–2000)". Meccanica 35 (5): 463–466. doi:10.1023/A:1010368106989. .
• Ignatieff, Yurie A.; Heike Willig (1999). Clifford Truesdell: Eine wissenschaftliche Biographie des Dichters, Mathematikers und Naturphilosophen. Aachen: Shaker Verlag. ISBN 3826548043. 
• Special issue of the Journal of Elasticity, vol. 70(1-3), devoted to Truesdell's memory:
  • Coleman, Bernard, 2003, "Memories of Clifford Truesdell", 1-13.
  • Giusti, E. "Clifford Truesdell (1919–2000), Historian of Mathematics", 15-22.
  • Noll, Walter. "The Genesis of Truesdell's Nonlinear Field Theories of Mechanics", 23-30.
  • Serrin, J. "An Appreciation of Clifford Truesdell", 31-38.
  • Speiser, D. "Clifford A. Truesdell's Contributions to the Euler and the Bernoulli Edition", 39-53.

External links

• Clifford Truesdell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Persondata
Name	Truesdell, Clifford Ambrose, III
Alternative names
Short description	American mathematician
Date of birth	February 18, 1919
Place of birth
Date of death	January 14, 2000
Place of death