Fred Tappert

Who is Fred Tappert?

Frederick Drach Tappert was an American physicist whose primary contributions were in underwater acoustics. He is noted for the development of the parabolic equation model and split-step Fourier algorithm for electromagnetic and ocean acoustic propagation.

Tappert began his scientific career in the field of plasma physics, receiving his Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1967. His dissertation, entitled "Kinetic theory of equilibrium plasmas", was supervised by Edward A. Frieman, then Associate Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

He was a member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Labs from 1967 to 1974. Among his notable accomplishments there was a collaboration with Akira Hasegawa on optical solitons which underpinned later advances in fiber-optic communication technology.

Following his years at Bell Labs, Tappert was a Senior Research Scientist at the Courant Institute of New York University from 1974 to 1978. He moved to Coral Gables, Florida, in 1978 to join the faculty of the University of Miami, where he had a joint appointment in the Department of Physics on the main campus and in the Department of Applied Marine Physics at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.