Johannes Martinus Burgers (Arnhem

Arnhem

Arnhem is a city and municipality, situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of Gelderland and located near the river Nederrijn as well as near the St. Jansbeek, which was the source of the city's development. Arnhem has 146,095 residents as one of the...

, January 13, 1895 – Washington D.C., June 7, 1981) was a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and the brother of the physicist W. G. Burgers. Burgers studied in Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian and Dutch physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem.- Biography :Paul Ehrenfest was born and grew up in Vienna in a Jewish...

, where he obtained his PhD in 1918. He is credited to be the father of Burgers' equation

Burgers' equation

Burgers' equation is a fundamental partial differential equation from fluid mechanics. It occurs in various areas of applied mathematics, such as modeling of gas dynamics and traffic flow...

, the Burgers vector

Burgers vector

The Burgers vector, named after Dutch physicist Jan Burgers, is a vector, often denoted b, that represents the magnitude and direction of the lattice distortion of dislocation in a crystal lattice....

 in dislocation

Dislocation

In materials science, a dislocation is a crystallographic defect, or irregularity, within a crystal structure. The presence of dislocations strongly influences many of the properties of materials...

 theory and the Burgers material

Burgers material

A Burgers material is a viscoelastic material which consists of a Maxwell material and a Kelvin material in series.It is named after the Dutch physicist Johannes Martinus Burgers....

 in viscoelasticity

Viscoelasticity

Viscoelasticity is the property of materials that exhibit both viscous and elastic characteristics when undergoing deformation. Viscous materials, like honey, resist shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied. Elastic materials strain instantaneously when stretched and just...

.

Jan Burgers was one of the co-founders of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

The International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics is believed to have been founded when Aachen professor Theodore von Kármán held a conference in Innsbruck in September of 1922. The purpose of the 1922 conference was to discuss questions of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. The...

 (IUTAM) in 1946, and was its secretary-general from 1946 until 1952.

External links

• A.J.Q. Alkemade, Burgers, Johannes Martinus (1895–1981), in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland.
• "Johannes Martinus Burgers; 13 January 1895 to 7 June 1981", biography at the University of Maryland
• JM Burgers Centrum
• The Burgers program for fluid dynamics at the University of Maryland
• Oral History interview transcript with Johannes Burgers 9 June 1962, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives