02 Short CV (text)
Michael Thompson, FRS
Picture: astronomy with grandson Charlie McRobie | ![](images/%5Bc2%5D%2006.06%20028%20%284%29.jpg) |
Michael
Thompson was born in Cottingham, Yorkshire in 1937, and attended the Hull Grammar School. He graduated from Cambridge University with first class honours in mechanical
sciences in 1958, winning
the three top prizes of the Engineering Department. One of these was the
prestigious Rex Moir Prize. He was later awarded two Cambridge doctorates, the PhD in 1962 and the ScD
in 1977. Recently, in 2004, he received an honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen.
While a post-doctoral research fellow at
Peterhouse, he spent a year as a Fulbright visitor in the Department of
Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University in California. Joining University College London (UCL) in
1964, he was appointed a Professor in 1977, and subsequently Director of the
Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics in 1991.
Based on his research into elastic buckling phenomena,
he published three books on instabilities, bifurcations and catastrophes. A
fourth book published in 1986 is now in its second edition as Nonlinear
Dynamics and Chaos (Wiley,
2002). Over 14,000 copies of this seminal work have been sold world-wide, and
it has been translated into Japanese and Italian.
Michael was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985, and served on the Council of
the Society. He won
the OMAE Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1985 in
recognition of his outstanding originality and significance. Seven years later,
in 1992, he was awarded the James Alfred Ewing Medal on the joint
nomination of the Presidents of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the
Royal Society. The award, founded in memory of Sir Alfred Ewing, is made for
special meritorious contributions to the science of engineering in the field of
research. He was a Senior Fellow of
the Science and Engineering Research Council from 1988 to 1993.
From 1998 to 2007, Michael was
the Editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Series A:
Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences), the world’s longest running
scientific journal. His special Millennium Issues of the journal, in which young
scientists were invited to give their visions of the future, were re-published
as three popular paper-backed books by Cambridge University Press in 2001. As a
follow-up to this successful venture, Michael has created a running programme of
Christmas Issues which he is using as the basis of his new Royal Society Series on Advances in Science. The first three books in the
series are Advances in Astronomy: from
the Big Bang to the Solar System (ed. JMT Thompson, ICP, 2005), Advances in Earth Science: from earthquakes to global warming (eds PR Sammonds & JΜΤ
Thompson, ICP, 2007), Advances in
Nanoengineering: electronics, materials and assembly (eds AG Davies & JΜΤ
Thompson, ICP, 2007).
Michael is now Emeritus Professor of Nonlinear
Dynamics at UCL, and an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Applied Mathematics
and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) of Cambridge University. He is active in promoting a greater understanding of
science and mathematics among the general public. Two popular lectures in the
Millennium Mathematics Project, delivered at DAMTP, are now streamed from the
web, and also available on DVD. In 2004 Michael was awarded a Gold Medal by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at their 40th Anniversary
Meeting for his lifetime contributions to mathematics.
In April 2006, Michael was appointed, part–time, as a
distinguished Sixth Century Professor in Theoretical and Applied Dynamics at
the University of Aberdeen.
Married with two children and ten grandchildren, his
recreations include astronomy with his grandchildren, wild-life photography,
badminton and tennis.
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