Background

Horace Lamb was born on November 27, 1849, in Stockport, England. He was the son of John Lamb and his wife Elizabeth Rangeley. The father was a foreman in a cotton mill, who had gained some distinction by an invention for the improvement of spinning machines. John died while his son was a child. Lamb's mother married again, and shortly afterwards Horace went to live with his strict but maternal aunt, Mrs. Holland.

Education

Lamb studied at Stockport Grammar School, where he made the acquaintance of a wise and kindly headmaster, Reverend Charles Hamilton, and a graduate of classics, Frederic Slaney Poole, who in his final year became a good friend. It was from these two tutors that Lamb acquired his taste for mathematics and, to a somewhat lesser extent, classical literature. At the age of seventeen Lamb qualified for admission to Queen’s College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in classics but proceeded to a mathematical career. He later gained major prizes in mathematics and astronomy.

Career

In 1872 Lamb became the second wrangler and was elected a fellow and lecturer of Trinity College. After three further years in Cambridge, he went to Australia as the first professor of mathematics at the University of Adelaide. He returned to England in 1885 as a professor of pure mathematics (later pure and applied mathematics) at Owens College, Manchester, and held this post until his retirement in 1920.

Like his teachers, Sir George Stokes and James Clerk Maxwell, Lamb saw from the outset of his career that success in applied mathematics demands both thorough knowledge of the context of application and mathematical skill. The fields in which he made his mark cover a wide range - electricity and magnetism, fluid mechanics, elasticity, acoustics, vibrations and wave motion, statics and dynamics, seismology, the theory of tides, and terrestrial magnetism. Sections of his investigations in different fields are, however, closely linked by common underlying mathematics. It was part of Lamb’s genius that he could see how to apply the formal solution of a problem in one field to make profound contributions to another.

To the scientific world in general, Lamb is probably most widely known for his work in fluid mechanics, embodied in his book Hydrodynamics, which appeared first in 1879 as A Treatise on the Motion of Fluids, the title being changed to Hydrodynamics in the second, much enlarged, edition of 1895. Successive editions, to the sixth and last in 1932, showed a nice assimilation and condensation of new developments and increasingly included Lamb’s own important contributions. The book is one of the most beautifully arranged and stimulating treatises ever written in a branch of applied mathematics - a model which modern scientific writers are often adjured to emulate.

In addition to solving numerous problems of direct hydrodynamical interest, as well as others of direct interest to electromagnetism and elasticity theory, Lamb applied many of the solutions with conspicuous success in geophysics. His much-quoted paper of 1904 gave an analytical account of the propagation, over the surface of an elastic solid, of waves generated by various assigned initial disturbances. The cases he studied bear intimately on earthquake wave transmission, and this paper is regarded today as one of the fundamental contributions to theoretical seismology. Modern attempts to interpret the finer details of earthquake records rest heavily on it. Another famous paper, published in 1882, analyzed the modes of oscillation of an elastic sphere. This paper is a classic in its completeness, and it recently rose to new prominence when free earth oscillations of the type Lamb had described were detected for the first time on records of the great Chilean earthquake of 1960. In 1903 he gave an analysis of two-dimensional wave motion which showed why the record of an earthquake usually has a prolonged tail.

Lamb’s contributions to geophysics were by no means confined to seismology but extended to the theory of tides and terrestrial magnetism. In 1863 Lord Kelvin, using theory on fortnightly tides, came to the historic conclusion that the average rigidity of the earth exceeds the rigidity of ordinary steel. A significant point in Kelvin’s theory, not well-evidenced at the time, later came to be questioned. In 1895 Lamb gave an argument that placed the theory on a new basis and made Kelvin’s conclusion inescapable. In 1915, in collaboration with Lorna Swain, he gave the first satisfactory account of the marked phase differences of tides observed in different parts of the oceans and seas, thereby settling a question which had been controversial since the time of Newton. In 1917 he worked out the deflection of the vertical caused by the tidal loading of the earth’s surface.

In 1889 Arthur Schuster raised the question of the causes of diurnal variation of terrestrial magnetism. Lamb thereupon showed that the answer was immediately derivable from results he had published in 1883 - that the variation is caused by influences outside the solid earth. He showed further that the magnitude of the variation is reduced by an increase in electrical conductivity below the earth’s surface. In addition to Hydrodynamics and numerous research papers, Lamb wrote texts, some of them still used today, on infinitesimal calculus, statics, dynamics, higher mechanics, and the dynamical theory of sound.

Achievements

• Horace Lamb was one of the world’s greatest applied mathematicians. He was distinguished not only as a contributor to knowledge but also as a teacher who inspired a generation of applied mathematicians, both thorough personal teaching and through superbly written books. He was often called “the great artist” of applied mathematics.
  
  Lamb was awarded the Royal Medal in 1902, the De Morgan Medal in 1911 and the Copley Medal in 1924, and also received many honors from overseas universities and academies. He was knighted in 1931.
  
  A room in the Alan Turing Building at the University of Manchester is named in his honor, and in 2013 the Sir Horace Lamb Chair was created at Manchester. A building at the University of Adelaide also bears his name.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Hydrodynamics 1895
  • The Dynamical Theory of Sound 1910
  • A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of the Motion of Fluids 1879
  • Higher mechanics 1920
  • Dynamics 1910
  • An Elementary Course of Infinitesimal Calculus 1919
  • Statics, Including Hydrostatics and the Elements of the Theory of Elasticity 1912
  • The Evolution Of Mathematical Physics 1919

Membership

Lamb was a key member from 1921 to 1927 of the Aeronautical Research Committee of Great Britain. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1884.

• 

  Fellow

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1884 - 1934

Personality

As a young man Lamb was noted as a hard worker, shy and reticent; in later life he played a prominent part in academic councils. He also possessed considerable literary and general ability and enjoyed reading in French, German, and Italian. He liked walking and climbing and was one of the early climbers of the Matterhorn.

Interests

• literature

• Sport & Clubs

  walking, climbing

Connections

Lamb was married to Elizabeth Foot; they had seven children.

Father:

John Lamb

Mother:

Elizabeth Rangeley

Spouse:

Elizabeth Foot

Son:

Henry Taylor Lamb

Acquaintance:

Charles Hamilton

Friend:

Frederic Slaney Poole

teacher:

George Stokes

teacher:

James Clerk Maxwell

colleague:

Lorna Swain

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973