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Howell Peregrine

British mathematician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ3141609
Source-derived summary

Howell Peregrine (30 December 1938 – 20 March 2007) was a British applied mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially of free surface flows such as water waves, and coastal engineering.

Education and career

Howell Peregrine joined the Mathematics Department of University of Bristol in 1964 following his undergraduate and postgraduate training at Oxford and Cambridge. He spent his entire career at Bristol. One of his most remarkable contributions was the theoretical prediction of a new nonlinear entity, now called the Peregrine soliton, that may explain the formation of hydrodynamics rogue waves and that has also been experimentally demonstrated more than 25 years later in the field of nonlinear fiber optics and then in 2011 in hydrodynamics with experiments in a water wave tank.

He was an associate editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics for more than 25 years.

Howell Peregrine died suddenly after a short battle against cancer. He was at the time a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Bristol.

Personal

Peregrine was known to be a good photographer of natural phenomena. Some of the photographs which he took himself appeared in his papers.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Howell Peregrine” as british mathematician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Howell, Peregrine and British.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1938, 2007, 1964, 2011—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1938-12-30. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Howell, Peregrine and British providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Howell Peregrine”, the useful work is to connect “british mathematician” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3141609. VIAF identifies the subject as 94553169. The Library of Congress control number is n82022156. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2007, 1964 and 2011.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Howell Peregrine” 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.