[photo taken March 1993 in sea kayak off Orcas Island, Washington]
George David Kerlick graduated first in his class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1970. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics under John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton University in 1975 and worked in General Relativity until 1979, in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Geometry, and Electromagnetics until 1986, and thereafter Scientific Visualization, Parallel Computing, and Computer Graphics until retirement from Boeing in 2004. He now works in Public Interest Science as a consultant.
At Princeton (1970-75) he investigated the Einstein-Cartan theory of Gravitation, looking for astrophysical and cosmological consequences, and discovered the phenomenon of particle pair production in this theory.
In postdoctoral work, he investigated the foundations of this theory, and its extension to theories with so-called non-metric connections. He also used a computer algebra system to evaluate higher Post-Newtonian orders of the weak-field, slow-motion approximation of general relativity.
At Nielson Engineering (1979-83) he developed methods for computing unsteady transonic flows, for generating grids, and strained coordinate perturbation methods for computational fluid dynamics.
At NASA Ames (1983-89) he developed visualizations for experimental flow data using Delaunay triangulations, for spectral method turbulence simulations using Fast Fourier Transforms, and wrote the level surface routines for NASA's flow analysis software. He developed visualizations for radar cross sections using newly available 3D graphics hardware. He originated the application of actor systems to scientific visualization and contributed to a software prototype (Tektronix Inc., 1989-90) based in part on this idea.
At the Boeing Company (1991-2004) he worked in the areas of CAD visualization, engineering visualization environments, virtual reality, simulation steering, and parallel and distributed high-performance computing. He helped Boeing's CAD systems to their corporate intranet, and developed Web-based systems for delivering visualization services to engineers using 3D web technologies.
He has consulted on 3D graphics for Geographic Information Systems
Dr. Kerlick has published more than 40 refereed papers and was one of four presenters of the 1989 ACM SIGGRAPH tutorial on Visualization. His lectures on Visualization and Relativity were published by Springer in 1996.
Last revised 10 September 2006.