Ragnar Fjørtoft

Ragnar Fjørtoft (1 August 1913 – 28 May 1998) was an internationally recognized Norwegian meteorologist. He was part of a Princeton, New Jersey team that in 1950 performed the first successful numerical weather prediction using the ENIAC electronic computer. He was also a professor of meteorology at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

Biography Ragnar Fjørtoft was born in Kristiania to the deaf teacher Lauritz Hansen Fjørtoft (1877–1941) and his wife Anne Birgitte Marie Schultze (1881–??). The family eventually moved to Trondheim, where Fjørtoft took his examen artium in 1933. He thereupon moved to Oslo to study natural science, with meteorology as specialization. His teacher was Halvor Solberg, who earlier had been a student of Vilhelm Bjerknes.

In 1946, Fjørtoft published a treatise on the stability of circular vortices, which gained international recognition. They published their work on numerical weather prediction in the periodical Tellus in November 1950. Fjørtoft died on 28 May 1998 in Oslo.