David Crighton
David George Crighton, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist.
Life
Crighton was born in Llandudno, North Wales, where his mother, Violet Grace Garrison, had been sent because of the bombing of London during the Second World War. He did not become interested in mathematics until his last two years at Watford Grammar School for Boys. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1961 and started lecturing at Woolwich Polytechnic in 1964, having completed only his bachelor's degree.A few years later he met John Ffowcs Williams and started to work for him at Imperial College London, while simultaneously studying for his doctorate at the same place. In 1974, he was appointed as a research fellow in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. However, he never took up this post, but instead accepted the chair in applied mathematics at the University of Leeds, which he held until 1986.
He then returned to Cambridge as Professor of Applied Mathematics in succession to George Batchelor.
He became Master of Jesus College in 1997 and held that post until his death. He was also head of the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department in Cambridge between 1991 and 2000.
Away from his mathematical work, Crighton was a devotee of the music of Richard Wagner, as well as music for the piano.
Work
Crighton's scientific interests were primarily in the theory of waves and aeroacoustics, as well as in some areas of fluid mechanics. He published over 120 papers. He also published one book in 1977 entitled Introduction to Wiener-Hopf methods in acoustics and vibration.In his first paper, Crighton studied the sound wave associated with turbulent flow over a discontinuous surface formed by two semi-infinite flexible planes. Over the years, he worked broadly in the fields of acoustics, equation theory and quasi-diabatic systems including solitons. This included works on the generalised Burgers' equation and inverse scattering theory.
The distinction of his work was recognised by the award of the Rayleigh Medal of the Institute of Acoustics, the Per Bruel Gold Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society.