Lamb, Horace (1849-1934)

English applied mathematician and engineer. He is noted for his many books on hydrodynamics, elasticity, sound, and mechanics. His chief work is Treatise on the Motion of Fluids (1879), revised and updated as Hydrodynamics (1895-1932).

Lamb was born in Stockport, Cheshire, and studied at Cambridge. He went to Australia in 1875 to take up the chair of mathematics at the University of Adelaide. In 1885 he returned to Manchester as professor at Owens College.

Lamb's contributions ranged wide over the field of applied mathematics, and he was particularly adept at applying the solution of a problem in one field to problems in another. A paper of 1882, which analysed the modes of oscillation of an elastic sphere, achieved its true recognition in 1960, when free Earth oscillations during an earthquake behaved in the way Lamb had described. A paper of 1904 gave an analytical account of propagation over the surface of an elastic solid of waves generated by given initial disturbances, and the analysis he provided is now regarded as one of the seminal contributions to theoretical seismology.