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About Ari Ben-Menahem
- Ari Ben-Menahem (Schlanger) has been professor of mathematics and geophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science since 1964 and visiting professor at MIT.
- He is a seismologist, author, polymath, and historian of science.
- He coauthored with Sarvajit Singh, "Seismic Waves and Sources: the mathematical theory of seismology", a pioneering treatise since the nascent of this discipline at the turn of the 20th century. Ben-Menahem was born in Berlin, Germany on November 4, 1928.
- He received his master's degree in physics in 1954 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his doctoral degree from the California Institute of Technology (CIT) in 1961.
- He did his post-doctoral research at CIT, where he worked with Hugo Benioff and Frank Press (1962-1965). In his doctoral thesis he pioneered the birth of modern seismic-source elastodynamics based on his theory of wave radiation from a finite rupturing fault with subshear or supershear velocity.
- His theory was confirmed through the observed asymmetric radiation of long-period surface-waves from the great Chilean earthquake of May 22, 1960, where he introduced the fundamental concepts of 'Directivity' and 'Potency' from which the moment tensor is derived.
- Since then, rupturing fault length, rupture velocity, moment-magnitude and moment energy are routinely calculable from spectra of recorded seismic waves-forms. In 1975, Ben-Menahem used seismic and barometric recording of the Tunguska event of June 30, 1908 to derive the height and energy of the explosion, demonstrating for the first time a feasible non-cometary mechanism of this extraterrestrial bolide encounter with earth. Ben-Menahem is the sole author of a 6-volume, 6000 pages treatise: Historical Encyclopedia of Natural and Mathematical Sciences published in 2009 by Springer Verlag.
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