Carl Wilhelm Oseen

C. W. Oseen in 1909, when he became professor at Uppsala University.

Carl Wilhelm Oseen (17 April 1879 in Lund – 7 November 1944 in Uppsala) was a theoretical physicist in Uppsala and Director of the Nobel Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm.

Life

Oseen was born in Lund, and took a Fil. Kand. degree (B.Sc.) at Lund University in 1897 and a Filosophie licentiat in 1900. He began practicing as a mathematics associate professor in 1902, and subsequently obtained his PhD a year afterward. He served as interim mathematics professor from 1904-1906 and 1907-1910.

He visited Göttingen in the winter of 1900–01, where he attended David Hilbert's lectures on partial differential equations. He was probably also influenced by the other famous mathematician in Göttingen, Felix Klein, and, on a later visit, by the hydrodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl. A great influence was also exercised by his teacher in Lund, A. V. Bäcklund.

In 1934 Oseen became a member of the American Mathematical Society.

Work

Oseen formulated the fundamentals of the elasticity theory of liquid crystals (Oseen elasticity theory), as well as the Oseen equations for viscous fluid flow at small Reynolds numbers. He gave his name to the Oseen tensor and, with Horace Lamb, to the Lamb–Oseen vortex. The Basset–Boussinesq–Oseen (BBO) equation describes the motion of – and forces on – a particle moving in an unsteady flow at low Reynolds numbers.

He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1936 in Oslo.

Nobel committee

Oseen was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1921, and a member of the Academy's Nobel Prize committee for physics from 1922. As a full professor of a Swedish university, Oseen also had the right to nominate Nobel Prize winners.

Oseen nominated Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1921, for Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect (rather than the more controversial theory of general relativity). Einstein was finally awarded the prize for 1921 when Oseen repeated the nomination in 1922.

Selected bibliography

• Oseen, C. W. (1911). "Sur les formules de green généralisées qui se présentent dans l'hydrodynamique et sur quelquesunes de leurs applications". Acta Mathematica. 34: 205–284. doi:10.1007/BF02393128. S2CID 122614175.
• Oseen, C. W. (1914). "Über einen Satz von Green und über die Definitionen von Rot und div". Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo. 38: 167–179. doi:10.1007/BF03015189. S2CID 119990517.
• Oseen, C. W. (1924). "Die analytische Theorie der Bewegungsgleichungen einer inkompressiblen zähen Flüssigkeit". Vorträge aus dem Gebiete der Hydro- und Aerodynamik (Innsbruck 1922). pp. 123–135. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-00280-3_10. ISBN 978-3-662-00260-5.
• Oseen, C. W. (1927). Neuere Methoden und Ergebnisse in der Hydrodynamik [Newer Methods and Results in Hydrodynamics] (in German). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
• Oseen, C. W. (1933). "The theory of liquid crystals". Transactions of the Faraday Society. 29 (140): 883–885. doi:10.1039/tf9332900883.
• Oseen, C. W. (1934). "Über Beziehungen zwischen Potentialtheorie und Liniengeometrie". Mathematische Zeitschrift. 38: 709–729. doi:10.1007/BF01170668. S2CID 122373518.

See also

• Oseen equations
• Oseen's approximation
• Lamb–Oseen vortex
• Basset–Boussinesq–Oseen equation
• Ewald–Oseen extinction theorem

Further reading

• Broberg, Gunnar. (1984) "Before 1932: Scientists writing their own history". History of Science in Sweden: the Growth of a Discipline, 1932-1982. Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in the History of Science. pp 9–24.