Sir Gilbert Walker
| Gilbert Walker | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Gilbert Thomas Walker 14 June 1868 Rochdale, Lancashire |
| Died | 4 November 1958 (aged 90) Coulsdon, Surrey |
| Alma mater |
Trinity College, Cambridge Imperial College London |
| Awards |
Fellow of the Royal Society Adams Prize (1899) Symons Gold Medal (1934) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Meteorology, Statistician |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge |
Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker, CSI, FRS (14 June 1868 – 4 November 1958) was an English physicist and statistician of the 20th century. Walker studied mathematics and applied it to a variety of fields including aerodynamics, electromagnetism and the analysis of time-series data before taking up a teaching position at Cambridge University. Although he had no experience in meteorology, he was recruited for a post in the Indian Meteorological Department where he worked on statistical approaches to predict the monsoons. He developed the methods in the analysis of time-series data that are now called the Yule-Walker equations. He is known for his groundbreaking description of the Southern Oscillation, a major phenomenon of global climate, and for discovering what is named after him as the Walker circulation, and for greatly advancing the study of climate in general. He was also instrumental in aiding the early career of the Indian mathematical prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan.
He was born in Rochdale, Lancashire on 14 June 1868, the fourth child and eldest son of Thomas Walker and Elizabeth Charlotte Haslehurst. Thomas was Borough Engineer of Croydon and had pioneered the use of concrete for town reservoirs. He attended Whitgift School where he showed an interest in mathematics and got a scholarship to study at St Paul's School. He obtained a degree in Metallurgy from Imperial College London and attended Trinity College, Cambridge where he was Senior Wrangler in 1889. His hard studies led to ill-health and he spent several winters recuperating in Switzerland where he learnt skating and became quite expert. He became a lecturer at Trinity College from 1895.
Walker was an established applied mathematician at the University of Cambridge when he took up a position as assistant to the meteorological reporter in 1903. He was elevated to the position of director general of observatories in India in 1904. Walker had never worked on meteorology but the previous director of the Indian Meteorological Department, John Eliot. Another predecessor in the Indian Meteorological Department, Henry Francis Blanford, had noticed the pattern that the summer monsoon in India and Burma was correlated with the spring snow cover in the Himalayas. In India, the failure of the Indian Ocean monsoon had brought severe famine to the country in 1899 and meteorology had great economic value. Walker developed Blanford's idea with quantitative rigour and came up with correlation measures (with a lag) and regression equations (or in time-series terminology, autoregression). He set up a group of Indian clerks to calculate correlations between weather parameters. The methods he introduced for time-series regression are now partly named after him (the other contributor was Udny Yule who studied sun-spot cycles) as the Yule-Walker equations. Analyzing vast amounts of weather data from India and lands beyond, over the next fifteen years he published the first descriptions of the great seesaw oscillation of atmospheric pressure between the Indian and Pacific Ocean, and its correlation to temperature and rainfall patterns across much of the Earth's tropical regions, including India. This is now called the El Niño Southern Oscillation. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India in 1911.
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