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Norman J. Zabusky is an American physicist, who is noted for the discovery of the soliton in the Korteweg–de Vries equation, in work completed with Martin Kruskal. This result early in his career was followed by an extensive body of work in computational fluid dynamics, which led him more recently to an examination of the importance of visualization in this field. In fact, he coined the term visiometrics to describe the process of using computer-aided visualization to guide one towards quantitative results.
Zabusky was born in New York City in 1929, and later attended the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1951, after which he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his Master's degree in electrical engineering in 1953. After two years, Zabusky decided to leave engineering and pursued a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, which he received in 1959 with a thesis in the area of stability of flowing magnetized plasmas.
In 1965, Zabusky and Kruskal pioneered the use of computer simulations to gain analytical insights into non-linear equations, and in the process, discovered the soliton solutions to the Korteweg–de Vries equation. The study of non-linear equations was enhanced by this discovery, opening up the door to analytical work on the integrability of the KdV equation and the equations of the KP hierarchy. But perhaps more important was the methodology. The use of computer simulations led Zabusky to an appreciation of the importance of appropriate visualization and quantification as a tool in analyzing fluid dynamical and wave systems.In 1990, he and Francois Bitz introduced the term visiometrics as described in the reference below.
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