Størmer, Fredrik Carl Mülertz

Born Sept. 3, 1874, in Skien; died Aug. 13, 1957, in Oslo. Norwegian geophysicist and mathematician. Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

In 1903, Sørnier became a professor at the University of Christiania (Oslo, after 1924). He put forth a theory according to which the polar auroras represent the luminescence of the upper layers of the atmosphere under the action of cosmic rays. Stornier carried out an analysis of the motion of cosmic-ray particles in a magnetic field. The method proposed by him for calculating the particles’ trajectories has become an accepted method in present-day mathematics for the numerical integration of ordinary differential equations. He also studied the structure and properties of the solar atmosphere.

Størmer became a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1934, of the Académie des Sciences of France in 1947, and of the Royal Society of London in 1951.