Ernie Tuck
Australian mathematician (1939-2009)
Ernest Oliver Tuck was an Australian applied mathematician. His work was primarily in fluid mechanics, and he is known for the Tuck's incompressibility function.
Early life and education
Tuck was born on 1 June 1939 in Adelaide, South Australia. He studied Applied Mathematics for his undergraduate degree at the University of Adelaide, where he was mentored by Professor R. B. Potts and obtained a First Class Honours Degree in 1960. He won a Legacy Scholarship to work on a PhD at Cambridge University where he was advised by Fritz Ursell. His PhD thesis was on the application of slender-body theory to ships. In it, he made a revolutionary approach of using matched asymptotic expansions in order to predict the wave resistance of a slender ship. He defended his dissertation in 1963 titled "The steady motion of a slender ship."
Career
In 1963 Tuck went to the United States to work with Francis Ogilvie and John Nicholas Newman at the David Taylor Model Basin, and subsequently with Ted Wu at Caltech.
In 1967, Tuck returned to Adelaide University as a reader in applied mathematics and was subsequently appointed Elder Professor of Mathematics. Tuck was promoted to a personal chair in 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ernie Tuck” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.