| 1 | Name: | Dr. Carl Wunsch | |
| Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
| Year Elected: | 2003 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1941 | ||
Carl Wunsch received his Ph.D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. He joined the faculty that same year as assistant professor of oceanography and has remained at M.I.T. throughout his distinguished career. He is currently the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography. Dr. Wunsch is the author of (with W. Munk, P. Worcester) Ocean Acoustic Tomography (1995), The Ocean Circulation Inverse Problem (1996), and Discrete Inverse and State Estimation Problems (2006). Carl Wunsch has probably worked on as broad a set of problems in physical oceanography as anyone now active, from seagoing to theory to data analysis to instrument development. He brought inverse methods to solving the ancient oceanographic problem of determining the general circulation. Walter Munk and Carl Wunsch invented ocean acoustic tomography. Dr. Wunsch proposed and helped organize the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, the largest and probably most successful of all oceanographic experiments. It included the remarkably successful use of altimetric satellites, which owes something to Wunsch for seeing what they could do. In recent years, Dr. Wunsch has begun trying to use what was learned about the modern ocean to bear on the interpretation of the paleoceanographic record. Dr. Wunsch received the Founder's Prize of the Texas Instruments Foundation in 1975, the A.G. Huntsman Prize from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and Government of Nova Scotia in 1988, the Maurice Ewing Medal from the American Geophysical Union and U.S. Navy in 1990, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Public Service Medal in 1993, and the Henry Stommel Research Prize from the American Meteorological Society in 2000. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. | |||