Who was Augustus Edward Hough Love?

Augustus Edward Hough Love was an English mathematical physicist born in 1863 who made foundational contributions to elasticity, wave propagation, and geodynamics. He is best remembered for predicting horizontally polarized seismic surface waves, now known as Love waves, and for introducing Love numbers to measure planetary tidal deformation. His extensive academic work earned him the Adams Prize in 1911 before his death in Oxford in 1940.

What we know

• Augustus Edward Hough Love was an English mathematical physicist born in 1863 who died in 1940. [1, 2]
• Love predicted the existence of horizontally polarized seismic surface waves mathematically in 1911. [2, 3]
• He won the Adams Prize in 1911 for his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics. [2]
• Love introduced dimensionless parameters known as Love numbers to characterize the elastic response of planetary bodies to tides. [2, 4]

Where to go next

• how it workedHow do Love waves work in seismology?
• what followedWhat are Love numbers in geophysics?
• whoWho was Toshi Shida?
• the bigger pictureWhat was the Adams Prize?
• an unexpected connectionWhat is the surface equivalence principle?

Sources

• [1]Augustus Edward Hough Love (Wikidata Q770329) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Augustus Edward Hough Love · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Love wave · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Love number · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Surface equivalence principle · CC BY-SA 4.0