William L. Burke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Lionel Burke (b. 1941 July 5, d. 1996 July 22) was an astronomy, astrophysics, and physics professor at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the author of Spacetime, Geometry, Cosmology (ISBN 0-935702-01-6), and of Applied differential geometry (ISBN 0-521-26929-6), a text expounding the virtues of differential forms over vector calculus for theoretical physics.
Born in Bennington, Vermont, Burke obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1963. His 1969 doctoral thesis, also at Caltech and supervised by Kip Thorne, was entitled The Coupling of Gravitational Radiation to Nonrelativistic Sources. His discovery of the Burke Potential, an aspect of gravitation overlooked by Einstein himself, dates from this period. He became a full professor at UCSC in 1988.
Burke is also known as the father of the Santa Cruz "chaos cabal", that nurtured the seminal work of MacArthur Fellow Robert S. Shaw and others.
An avid hiker and Go player, Bill Burke died from a cervical fracture sustained in an automobile accident.
