Philip M. Morse
Philip McCord Morse | |
---|---|
Born | MIT | August 6, 1903
Thesis | A Theory of the Electric Discharge through Gases (1929) |
Doctoral advisor | Karl Taylor Compton |
Doctoral students | Charles Draper Ronald A. Howard John Little Leonard Schiff |
Philip McCord Morse (August 6, 1903 – 5 September 1985), was an American physicist, administrator and pioneer of operations research (OR) in World War II.[1] He is considered to be the father of operations research in the U.S.
Biography
Morse graduated from the
From the spring through the summer of 1931, he was at
In 1949 he was named the first research director of the
He was a member of a
In 1946, he was a recipient of the
Work
Operations research
Philip Morse made many contributions to the development of operations research (OR). Early in 1942 he organized the
Philip Morse co-authored Methods of Operations Research, the first OR textbook in the U.S., with George E. Kimball based on the Navy work. His further writings include the influential books Queues, Inventories, and Maintenance and Library Effectiveness. He received ORSA's Lanchester Prize in 1968 for the latter book.
Philip Morse gave the opening address at the 1957 organizing meeting of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). In 1959 he chaired the first NATO advisory panel on OR.
Physics
Philip Morse had a distinguished career in physics. Amongst his contributions to physics are the textbooks Quantum Mechanics (with Edward Condon), Methods of Theoretical Physics (with Herman Feshbach), Vibration and Sound, Theoretical Acoustics, and Thermal Physics. Morse is also one of the founding editors of Annals of Physics.[7] In 1929 he proposed the Morse potential function for diatomic molecules which was often used to interpret vibrational spectra, though the standard is now the more modern Morse/Long-range potential.
Administration
His administrative talents were applied in roles as co-founder of the MIT Acoustics Laboratory, first director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, founder and first director of the MIT Computation Center, and board member of the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analyses.
He chaired the advisory committee that supervised preparation of Handbook of Mathematical Functions, with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, commonly known as Abramowitz and Stegun.
Publications
- 1945. Methods of Operations Research
- Queues, Inventories, and Maintenance[8] and Library Effectiveness
- Quantum Mechanics. With Edward Condon.
- Methods of Theoretical Physics with Herman Feshbach.[9]
- Vibration and Sound.
- Theoretical Acoustics with K. Uno Ingard.
- Thermal Physics
- 1977. In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977.
References
- .
- ISBN 978-1-4419-6280-5.
- ISBN 978-1441962805.
Phil published four paper on electron discharges in gases, now known as plasma physics. Compton decided to accept one of Phil's papers as his dissertation (Morse 1928): "A theory of the electric discharge through gases." He received his Ph.D. in 1929.
- ^ Philip M. Morse In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life (MIT Press, second printing 1978) p. 100.
- ^ Paul Kirkpatrick Address of Recommendation by Professor Paul Kirkpatrick, Chairman of the Committee on Awards, American Journal of Physics 17 (5) 312-314 (1949). In this article, the following students of Arnold Sommerfeld are mentioned: William V. Houston, Karl Bechert, Otto Scherzer, Otto Laporte, Linus Pauling, Carl Eckart, Gregor Wentzel, Peter Debye, and Philip M. Morse.
- ^ John Burchard M.I.T. in World War II (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1948) p. 92.
- ^ "Annals of Physics Editorial Board". Elsevier - Annals of Physics. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
- doi:10.1137/1001042.
- .
External links
- McCord Morse, Philip (2003). "IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame". International Transactions in Operational Research. 10 (3): 307–309. .
- Official website
- Philip M. Morse — Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences
- Philip McCord Morse at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Biography of Philip Morse from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences