Blake Temple (born 1951) is an American applied mathematician and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. His research concerns shock waves, general relativity, partial differential equations, numerical analysis, and systems of conservation laws.
Education and career
Temple was born in 1951.
Temple received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1973, an M.S. in mathematics and education from Michigan in 1976, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan in 1980.
After completing his doctorate, he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University from 1980 to 1982, a visiting member of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1982 to 1983, and a research fellow and Van Vleck Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined the University of California, Davis in 1986, became professor in 1990, and was named Distinguished Professor of Mathematics in 2012.
Temple was chair of the UC Davis Graduate Group in Applied Mathematics from 1988 to 1990 and from 2004 to 2007. He was a visiting scholar at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in 2002, the Isaac Newton Institute in 2003, and a Gehring Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 2008.
Research
Temple's research is centered on the mathematical theory of shock waves and their role in nonlinear partial differential equations and general relativity. His early work included systems of conservation laws, invariant submanifolds, the water-hammer problem, and stability questions for numerical methods such as Godunov's method.
With collaborators, Temple developed a theory of shock-wave propagation in the Einstein equations of general relativity. With Joel Smoller, he constructed shock-wave cosmological models, including models in which an expanding Friedmann universe is matched to a Schwarzschild spacetime by a shock wave. Temple and Smoller also studied expanding wave solutions of the Einstein equations that introduce corrections to the standard cosmological redshift-luminosity relation.
Temple has also worked with Robin Young on time-periodic solutions of the compressible Euler equations and nonlinear sound-wave propagation, and with Moritz Reintjes on regularity transformation equations for smoothing gravitational metrics in general relativity.
In 1990, Temple published From Newton to Einstein in the American Mathematical Monthly, presenting Einstein's derivation of the perihelion shift in Mercury's orbit at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate mathematics students.
Awards and honors
National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1980-1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1994-1995 Gehring Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan, 2008 Distinguished Visiting Professor, Taiwan and Hong Kong, 2009 Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, 2012
Selected publications
References
External links