Henry Stommel

person · earth

American oceanographer whose 1948 paper "The westward intensification of wind-driven ocean currents" explained why the fast currents are always on the western side of an ocean basin. Working with a rectangular, flat-bottomed model ocean, he showed that with a constant Coriolis parameter the circulation is symmetric, and that allowing it to vary with latitude crowds the streamlines against the western boundary. It is one of the shortest routes in science from an idealised model to a feature anyone can see on a satellite image.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.