Abstract
PROF. HAROLD JEFFREYS, who has recently been elected to the Plumian professorship of astronomy and experimental philosophy in the University of Cambridge, in succession to the late Sir Arthur Eddington, is a theoretical geophysicist of world-wide repute. He has been a fellow of St. Johns College, Cambridge, since 1914, and a fellow of the Royal Society since 1925. During the First World War, and for several years afterwards, he was at the Meteorological Office, and following a period of some years as a lecturer at his own College he was appointed reader in geophysics in the University of Cambridge in 1931. He is perhaps best known as a seismologist, but as evidence of his versatility it may be mentioned that, in addition to gaining the Adams Prize in 1927, he has been awarded the Buchan Prize by the Royal Meteorological Society (1929), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1937) and the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society (1939). He has written extensively on probability, notably in relation to significance tests, and an axiomatic exposition of the theory is set out in his book on the “Theory of Probability”, to which his earlier book, “Scientific Inference”, makes a suitable introduction. His books on Cartesian tensors and on operational methods have been a stimulus, to the use of these techniques. The best-known work of Prof. Jeffreys is undoubtedly “The Earth”, and it may fairly be said that this treatise, much of it his own researches, welded together a number of scattered topics into a coherent subject. It was indeed felicitous that he dedicated this work in 1924 to a former Plumian professor, Sir George Howard Darwin, “The Founder of Modern Geophysics”.
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Plumian Chair in the University of Cambridge Prof. H. Jeffreys, F.R.S. Nature 158, 866 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158866b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158866b0