{"id":947,"date":"2020-05-26T08:17:13","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T07:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/maths-student-blogs\/?p=947"},"modified":"2020-05-26T08:17:13","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T07:17:13","slug":"phyllis-nicolson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/maths-student-blogs\/2020\/05\/phyllis-nicolson\/","title":{"rendered":"Phyllis Nicolson"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this historical feature we explore Phyllis Nicolson (1917-1968) and her influential work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Phyllis Nicolson (n\u00e9e Lockett), most well-known for her work on the Crank-Nicolson method, received her BSc (1938), MSc (1939) and PhD (1946) in Physics from the University of Manchester before taking up a research fellowship at Cambridge University for three years. After the accidental death of her husband in 1952, she was appointed to take over his lectureship in Physics at Leeds University.<\/p>\n

Between 1940 and 1945, Nicolson was part of a research group at the University of Manchester led by Douglas Hartree (famous for the Hartee-Fock method) which worked on wartime problems for the Ministry of Supply, one being magnetron theory and performance.<\/p>\n

With John Crank, Phyllis worked on a method to numerically solve the heat equation and other similar partial differential equations. The Crank-Nicolson method improved on previous methods such as the one put forward by Lewis Fry Richardson in 1910. Richardson\u2019s method made it possible to easily compute a numerical solution for the heat equation but it was numerically unstable. The Crank-Nicolson method, which is numerically stable, is based on the trapezoidal rule which requires solutions to simple linear equations at each time step.<\/p>\n

Phyllis died of breast cancer in 1968 at the age of 51.<\/p>\n

Related links<\/h2>\n