Blake Temple

Blake Temple (born 1951) is an American applied mathematician and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. His research concerns shock waves, general relativity, partial differential equations, numerical analysis, and systems of conservation laws.

Education and career

Temple was born in 1951.

With collaborators, Temple developed a theory of shock-wave propagation in the Einstein equations of general relativity. With Joel Smoller, he constructed shock-wave cosmological models, including models in which an expanding Friedmann universe is matched to a Schwarzschild spacetime by a shock wave. Temple and Smoller also studied expanding wave solutions of the Einstein equations that introduce corrections to the standard cosmological redshift-luminosity relation.

Temple has also worked with Robin Young on time-periodic solutions of the compressible Euler equations and nonlinear sound-wave propagation, and with Moritz Reintjes on regularity transformation equations for smoothing gravitational metrics in general relativity.

In 1990, Temple published From Newton to Einstein in the American Mathematical Monthly, presenting Einstein's derivation of the perihelion shift in Mercury's orbit at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate mathematics students.

Awards and honors

National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1980-1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1994-1995 Gehring Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan, 2008 Distinguished Visiting Professor, Taiwan and Hong Kong, 2009 Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, 2012

Selected publications