Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Urho Uotila (PhD - OSU 1959)


The first PhD thesis on gravimetry at OSU was written by Urho Uotila.Uotila is a re-known professor in geodesy at OSU Geodetic Science Dept. Uotila (his full name is Urho Antti Kalevi Uotila) obtained PhD from OSU in 1959. His thesis “Investigation on the gravity field and shape of the Earth” was the first doctoral dissertation on gravity written at OSU. Uotila’s research was supervised by Heiskanen and the thesis was examined by Dr Paul M Pepper (Director of MCRL OSU) and Dr Chuji Tsuboi of Tokyo University. The computational task was handled by the Numerical Computation Laboratory at OSU on IBM 650 machine. The machine was bought and installed at OSU in 1956.

With this machine, the gravity group at OSU (particularly Uotila and Heiskanen) had calculated the bumps and depressions of the geoid reliably for over seven thousand points located in the northern hemisphere. Too little material had been obtained from the southern hemisphere in order for the results to be reliable. According to the calculation work, the geoid surface is slightly over 40 meters too low in the western part of the Atlantic, some 40 meters too high in the eastern part of the Atlantic and in Central and South-West Europe, about 25 meters too low in India, approximately 20 meters too high in the East-Indian archipelago and so on.

Uotila’s thesis consists of ten sections/chapters with 152 written pages. Fifty eight references were listed.


Urho Uotila
(b.1923; d.2006)
Read Uotila thesis - here.
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