Sydney Chapman (astronomer)

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For other persons named Sydney Chapman, see Sydney Chapman (disambiguation).

Sydney Chapman (29 January 1888 – 16 June 1970) was a British-American mathematician and sometimes geophysicist. He was born in Manchester, England and he received his higher education at the Royal Technical Institute at Salford (now the University of Salford), and at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge, where he majored in mathematics.

For part of his academic career, Chapman held the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1919 to 1924. He was later a member of the faculty at Oxford University.

Dr. Chapman's most noted accomplishments in mathematics were in the field of stochastic processes (random processes), especially Markov processes. In his study of Markovian stochastic processes and their generalizations, Chapman and the Russian Andrey Kolmogorov independently developed the pivotal set of equations in the field, the Chapman-Kolmogorov equations.

In his professional life, he was a mathematician who also dealt in astronomy, atmospheric physics, & geophysics from time to time. Chapman became a fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford. In 1949, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1964, he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. He is credited with working out, in 1930, the photochemical mechanisms that give rise to the ozone layer.

Instead of continuing to work at an Oxford University post until retirement age (65), Chapman left early to take research and teaching oportunites of different time durations all over the world, including at the University of Alaska and the University of Colorado, but also as far afield as in Istanbul, Cairo, Prague, and Tokyo. He passed away in Boulder, Colorado in 1970 at the age of 82. Chapman has frequently relation to German geophysicst, e.g. Ludwig Biermann, Hans Ertel, Gerhard Fanselau, Adolf Schmidt and mostly Julius Bartels. Chapman visited German because he was a member of the "Leodpoldina". Wilfried Schröder has given a review on Chapman's relaion to these German scientists in a book published in the serial "§ Beiträge zur Geschichte der Geophysik und Kosmischen Physik, 2008, Volume 6.