Born Edinburgh, Scotland, 5 July 1820
Died Glasgow, Scotland, 24 December 1872
Scottish railroad engineer William Rankine, among many other activities ranging over science and engineering, wrote down in 1869 a set of equations connecting the density, pressure, and temperature of gases on the two sides of a shock wave. These were generalized in 1887 by Pierre Henri Hugoniot (1851–1897) and, in the form of the Rankine–Hugoniot relations, can be used to describe, for instance, propagation of a supernova remnant moving into the interstellar medium at a speed faster than that of sound.
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Selected Reference
Duab, Edward E. (1970). “Waterston, Rankine, and Clausius on the Kinetic Theory of Gases.” Isis. 61: 105.
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Trimble, V. (2007). Rankine, William John Macquorn. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1146
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