Joseph Valentin Boussinesq

Who was Joseph Valentin Boussinesq?

Joseph Valentin Boussinesq was a French mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to the theory of hydrodynamics, vibration, light, and heat.

From 1872 to 1886, he was appointed professor at Faculty of Sciences of Lille, lecturing differential and integral calculus at Institut industriel du Nord. From 1896 to his retirement in 1918, he was professor of mechanics at Faculty of Sciences of Paris.

John Scott Russell experimentally observed his great solitary wave of translation in 1834 and reported it during the 1844 Meeting of the British Association for the advancement of science. Subsequently this was developed into the modern physics of solitons. In 1871, Boussinesq published the first mathematical theory to support Russell's experimental observation, and in 1877 introduced the KdV equation. In 1876, Lord Rayleigh published his mathematical theory to support Russell's experimental observation. At the end of his paper, Lord Rayleigh admitted that Boussinesq's theory came before his.

In 1897 he published Théorie de l' écoulement tourbillonnant et tumultueux des liquides, a work that greatly contributed to the study of turbulence and hydrodynamics.