Alar Toomre is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
13 Facts About Alar Toomre
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Alar Toomre received an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering and Physics from MIT in 1957 and then studied at the University of Manchester on a Marshall Scholarship where he obtained a Ph.
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Alar Toomre returned to MIT to teach after completing his Ph.
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Alar Toomre was appointed an Associate Professor of Mathematics at MIT in 1965, and Professor in 1970.
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In 1964, Alar Toomre devised a local gravitational stability criterion for differentially rotating disks.
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Alar Toomre collaborated with Peter Goldreich in 1969 on the subject of polar wander, developing the theory of polar wander.
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Alar Toomre conducted the first computer simulations of galaxy mergers in the 1970s with his brother Juri, an astrophysicist and solar physicist.
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Peter Goldreich 8.
In 1977 Alar Toomre suggested that elliptical galaxies are the remnants of the major mergers of spiral galaxies.
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Alar Toomre further showed that based on the local galaxy merger rate, over a Hubble time the observed number of elliptical galaxies are produced if the universe begins with only spiral galaxies.
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From this work, the Alar Toomre brothers identified the process of collision evolution as the Alar Toomre sequence.
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In 1993, Alar Toomre received the Dirk Brouwer Award which recognizes "outstanding contributions to the field of Dynamical Astronomy".
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Alar Toomre was one of the 1984 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the "Genius Grant".
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Alar Toomre was the recipient of the Magellanic Premium award in 2014 for his work in numerical galaxy simulations during the 1960s.