Darryl D. Holm

Darryl Holm (born 4th October 1947) is an American applied mathematician, and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. He studied Physics at the University of Minnesota, and Physics and Mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he wrote his dissertation entitled "Symmetry breaking in fluid dynamics: Lie group reducible motions for real fluids", receiving his PhD in 1976, supervised by Roy Axford. A result discovered in this work was later used to substantiate the accuracy of the Los Alamos on-site yield verification method (CORRTEX) for the US-USSR Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT).

Holm's main research contributions have been in nonlinear science, from integrable to chaotic behaviour, from solitons to turbulence, and from fluid dynamics to shape analysis. Much of this work is based on Lie symmetry reduction from Hamilton's principle. He joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1971, moving to the theoretical division in 1980, where he helped found the Center for Nonlinear Studies and served as its acting director. With Roberto Camassa, he derived the Camassa-Holm equation, which is an integrable partial differential equation for nonlinear shallow water waves, whose solutions in the dispersionless limit are peaked solitons, so called peakons, published in 1993. In 2005, he moved to Imperial College London as Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, supported by a Wolfson fellowship, and was awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2011.

He has written a number of books in geometric mechanics.