Augustus Edward Hough Love

Augustus Edward Hough Love, often known as A. E. H. Love, was an English mathematical physicist famous for research on elasticity, born in Weston-super-Mare on 17 April 1863 and died in Oxford on 5 June 1940. He also studied wave propagation, and he won the Adams Prize in 1911 for his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics, in which he developed the mathematical model of surface waves known as Love waves. He also contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced the Love numbers used for Earth tides. He was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School and St Johns College, Cambridge, where he placed as Second Wrangler in 1885, and in 1899 he was appointed Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, a post he held until his death. He wrote the classic two volume A Treatise on the Mathematical Theory of Elasticity, received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1909, and was secretary and then president of the London Mathematical Society.