John Wettlaufer
applied mathematician
John S. Wettlaufer is an American physicist and applied mathematician. He is the A. M. Bateman Professor of Geophysics, Mathematics, and Physics at Yale University, in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Mathematics and Physics. He is also research professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) and Stockholm University.
Wettlaufer's research areas include interfacial premelting, frost heaving, the growth of sea ice, glacier flow, ice in the atmosphere, ancient ice climate records, Arctic climate dynamics, capillarity in soft elastic solids, mushy layer convection, and stochastic methods applied to fluid dynamics, convection, and astrophysics.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (2003), a Guggenheim fellow (2010), a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Class for Physics, 2015), a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2019), and a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2023). He has been a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics since 2021.
Education
Wettlaufer received a B.S. with Honors in mathematics and physics from the University of Puget Sound in 1985, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1991. His dissertation, The Directional Solidification of Salt Water, was supervised by Norbert Untersteiner, J. Gregory Dash, and Michael Schick.
Career
Wettlaufer's primary appointment has been at Yale University since 2002, with concurrent affiliations at the University of Oxford from 2010 to 2018 and at Nordita and Stockholm University since 2014.
From 1991 to 2001, Wettlaufer held postdoctoral and faculty positions at the University of Washington, with appointments in the Department of Physics and at the Applied Physics Laboratory, and took part in field measurements on Arctic pack ice.
“John Wettlaufer” enters the record as applied mathematician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Wettlaufer and applied can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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