Keith Bullen (mathematician)

Keith Edward Bullen (1906 to 1976) was a New Zealand-born mathematician and geophysicist, noted for his seismological interpretation of the deep structure of the Earth's mantle and core. He went to St John's College, Cambridge in 1931 as a research student under Harold Jeffreys and worked with Jeffreys on the revision of the travel times of seismic waves from earthquakes. He was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney in Australia from 1945 until 1971. His first book, Introduction to the Theory of Seismology, appeared in 1947 and has been a standard text for seismology ever since, and his last, The Earth's Density, appeared in 1975. Although deaf, he played a considerable role in international geophysics as president of the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior and vice-president of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1949 and received the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 1961 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1974.