Carl Anton Bjerknes was born in
Oslo, Norway. His father was Abraham Isaksen Bjerknes and his mother Elen Birgitte Holmen. Bjerknes studied
mining at the
University of Oslo, and after that
mathematics at the
University of Göttingen and the
University of Paris. In 1866 he held a chair for
applied mathematics and in 1869 for mathematics. Over a fifty-year time period, Bjerknes taught mathematics at the
University of Oslo and at the military college. A pupil of
Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet,
Gabriel Lamé and
Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bjerknes worked for the rest of his life in the field of
hydrodynamics. He tried to explain the
electrodynamics of
James Clerk Maxwell by hydrodynamical analogies and similarly he proposed a
mechanical explanation of gravitation. Although he did not succeed in his attempts to explain all those things, his findings in the field of hydrodynamics were important. His experiments were shown at the first
International Exposition of Electricity in
Paris that ran from August 15, 1881 through to November 15, 1881 at the Palais de l'Industrie on the Champs-Élysées and at the Scandinavian naturalist meeting in
Stockholm.
John Charles Fields the founder of the
Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics had this to say about the great minds that Norway had produced since it gained independence: ==International Exposition of Electricity==