James Lighthill

Sir Michael James Lighthill

James Lighthill was born to Ernest Balzar Lichtenberg and Marjorie Holmes: an Alsatian mining engineer who changed his name to Lighthill in 1917, and the daughter of an engineer. The family lived in Paris until 1927, when the father retired and returned to live in England. As a young man, James Lighthill was known as Michael Lighthill.[9]

Lighthill was educated at Winchester College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943.^[10]

Career and research

Lighthill specialised in

In 1964 he became the Royal Society's resident professor at Imperial College London, before returning to Trinity College, Cambridge, five years later as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a chair he held until 1979, when he was succeeded by Stephen Hawking. Lighthill then became Provost of University College London (UCL) – a post he held until 1989.

Lighthill founded the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in 1964, alongside Professor Sir Bryan Thwaites. In 1968, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Science) by the University of Bath.^[15] In 1972 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "Aquatic Animal Locomotion".^[16]

In the early 1970s, partly in reaction to significant internal discord within that field, the

His former students include Gerald B. Whitham^[1] and Steve Furber.^[2]

Publications

• Lighthill, M. J. (1952). "On sound generated aerodynamically. I. General theory".
  S2CID 124316233
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1954). "On sound generated aerodynamically. II. Turbulence as a source of sound".
  S2CID 123268161
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1958). Introduction to Fourier Analysis. Cambridge Monographs on Mechanics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-521-09128-2
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1958). Introduction to Fourier analysis and generalised functions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-521-05556-7.^[19]
• Lighthill, M. J. (1960). Higher approximations in aerodynamics theory. Princeton University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-691-07976-9
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1986). An informal introduction to theoretical fluid mechanics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  ISBN 978-0-19-853630-7
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1987). Mathematical Biofluiddynamics. CBMS-NSF Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics. Society for Industrial Mathematics.
  ISBN 978-0-89871-014-4
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (2001). Waves in fluids. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-521-01045-0
  .
• Lighthill, M. J. (1997). Hussaini, M. Yousuff (ed.). Collected papers of Sir James Lighthill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-19-509222-6
  .