Ragnar Fjørtoft
| Ragnar Fjørtoft | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 1, 1913 Kristiania, Norway |
| Died | May 28, 1998 (aged 84) Oslo, Norway |
| Nationality | Norwegian |
| Institutions | University of Oslo, University of Copenhagen, Institute for Advanced Study |
| Influences | Bjerknes, Charney, Solberg, von Neumann |
| Influenced | Eliassen, Palm, Solberg |
| Notable awards | Order of St. Olav, International Meteorological Organization Prize |
| Spouse | Ragnhild Nordskog |
Ragnar Fjørtoft (1 August 1913 – 28 May 1998) was an internationally recognized Norwegian meteorologist. He was part of a Princeton, New Jersey team that in 1950 performed the first successful numerical weather prediction using the ENIAC electronic computer. He was also a professor of meteorology at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
Ragnar Fjørtoft was born in Kristiania to the deaf teacher Lauritz Hansen Fjørtoft (1877–1941) and his wife Anne Birgitte Marie Schultze (1881–??). The family eventually moved to Trondheim, where Fjørtoft took his examen artium in 1933. He thereupon moved to Oslo to study natural science, with meteorology as specialization. His teacher was Halvor Solberg, who earlier had been a student of Vilhelm Bjerknes.
On 29 March 1939, Fjørtoft married Ragnhild Nordskog (1918–). In the same year, he moved to Bergen, where he became a meteorologist at the Forecasting Division of Western Norway. Both in Oslo and Bergen, Fjørtoft was engaged in political left-wing activism in Mot Dag, and was a member of the socialist students' league Sosialistisk studenterlag in Bergen.
In 1946, Fjørtoft published a treatise on the stability of circular vortices, which gained international recognition. In the same year, he was appointed meteorologist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, where he came in contact with Arnt Eliassen. In 1949, Fjørtoft was invited to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States. Here, he joined a team composed of the American meteorologists Jule Charney, Philip Thomson, Larry Gates, and applied mathematician John von Neumann, who performed the first successful numerical prediction using the ENIAC electronic computer with the assistance of ENIAC programmer Klara Dan von Neumann. They published their work on numerical weather prediction in the periodical Tellus in November 1950.
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