Comprehensive biography of Anthony Fokker, the famed Dutch pilot and daredevil aviator Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation tells the larger-than-life true story of maverick pilot and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker. Fokker came from an affluent Dutch family and developed a gift for tinkering with mechanics. Despite not receiving a traditional education, he stumbled his way into aviation as a young stunt pilot in Germany in 1910. He survived a series of spectacular airplane crashes and rose to fame within a few years. A combination of industrial espionage, luck, and deception then propelled him to become Germany's leading aircraft manufacturer during World War I, making him a multimillionaire by his midtwenties. When the German Revolution swept the country in 1918 and 1919, Fokker made a spectacular escape to the United States. He set up business in New York and New Jersey in 1921, and shortly thereafter became the world's largest aircraft manufacturer. The U.S. Army and Navy acquired his machines, and his factories equipped legendary carriers such as Pan American and TWA at the dawn of commercial air transport. Yet despite his astounding success, his empire collapsed in the late 1920s after a series of ill-conceived business decisions and deeply upsetting personal dramas. In 1927, aviator Richard Byrd solicited a Fokker three-engine plane to be the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. The plane was damaged on a test flight and Charles Lindbergh beat him to it. Lindbergh's solo adventure in the Spirit of St. Louis earned him--and cost Fokker--a lasting place in the history books. Using previously undiscovered records and primary sources, Marc Dierikx traces Fokker's extraordinary life and celebrates his spectacular achievements.

One of the central problems synergetics is concerned with consists in the study of macroscopic qualitative changes of systems belonging to various disciplines such as physics, chemistry, or electrical engineering. When such transitions from one state to another take place, fluctuations, i.e., random processes, may play an im portant role. Over the past decades it has turned out that the Fokker-Planck equation pro vides a powerful tool with which the effects of fluctuations close to transition points can be adequately treated and that the approaches based on the Fokker Planck equation are superior to other approaches, e.g., based on Langevin equa tions. Quite generally, the Fokker-Planck equation plays an important role in problems which involve noise, e.g., in electrical circuits. For these reasons I am sure that this book will find a broad audience. It pro vides the reader with a sound basis for the study of the Fokker-Planck equation and gives an excellent survey of the methods of its solution. The author of this book, Hannes Risken, has made substantial contributions to the development and application of such methods, e.g., to laser physics, diffusion in periodic potentials, and other problems. Therefore this book is written by an experienced practitioner, who has had in mind explicit applications to important problems in the natural sciences and electrical engineering.

A detailed study of one of the greatest warplanes in aeronautical history, made famous by Manfred von Richthofen and other leading German aces. This profusely illustrated book includes a brief outline of the history of the Fokker company, the development of the Triplane, its initial employment and its subsequent use over the front line. There is also an analysis of unit and individual markings. A leading reference work on the subject. Includes 250 b&w photos, b&w drawings and illustrations, maps, and 30 color aircraft artworks by noted aviation illustrator Harry Dempsey.

Centered around the natural phenomena of relaxations and fluctuations, this monograph provides readers with a solid foundation in the linear and nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations that describe the evolution of distribution functions. It emphasizes principles and notions of the theory (e.g. self-organization, stochastic feedback, free energy, and Markov processes), while also illustrating the wide applicability (e.g. collective behavior, multistability, front dynamics, and quantum particle distribution). The focus is on relaxation processes in homogeneous many-body systems describable by nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations. Also treated are Langevin equations and correlation functions. Since these phenomena are exhibited by a diverse spectrum of systems, examples and applications span the fields of physics, biology and neurophysics, mathematics, psychology, and biomechanics.

There has recently been a renewal of interest in Fokker-Planck operators, motivated by problems in statistical physics, in kinetic equations, and differential geometry. Compared to more standard problems in the spectral theory of partial differential operators, those operators are not self-adjoint and only hypoelliptic. The aim of the analysis is to give, as generally as possible, an accurate qualitative and quantitative description of the exponential return to the thermodynamical equilibrium. While exploring and improving recent results in this direction, this volume proposes a review of known techniques on: the hypoellipticity of polynomial of vector fields and its global counterpart, the global Weyl-Hörmander pseudo-differential calculus, the spectral theory of non-self-adjoint operators, the semi-classical analysis of Schrödinger-type operators, the Witten complexes, and the Morse inequalities.

The appearance in July 1915 of the Fokker E I heralded a reign of terror over the Western Front that the Allies called the 'Fokker Scourge'. The French Nieuport 11 was one type desperately thrown into action to counter the Fokkers. The swirling dogfights between this fighter – and its more powerful but more unwieldy stablemate, the Nieuport 16 – and a succession of improved Fokkers, the E II, E III and E IV, came to symbolise air combat in World War I. This book gives a detailed look at the developmental history of the fighters, contrasting the interrupter gear-equipped Fokker with the more improvised solution incorporated in the Nieuport – a machine gun fitted to the upper wing to avoid the propeller entirely. The Germans went on to abandon the monoplane in favour of a new and deadly generation of biplane fighters, based on the lessons learned from these vicious engagements and influenced by the success of the French Nieuport.

Featuring stunning illustrations, this compact volume explores the early successes of the aircraft model and its aces. Although only built in modest numbers principally for the Dutch Air Force, the low-cost monoplane D.XXI fighter enjoyed its greatest success in combat with the Finnish Air Force. The Dutch D.XXIs saw less than a week of action following the German invasion of the west on 10 May 1940, with many of the country's 28 fighters being destroyed on the ground. However, those that survived the initial onslaught inflicted losses on the Luftwaffe. By then, however, the D.XXI had found everlasting fame in Finland during the Winter War of 1939-40. Proving itself a real thorn in the side of the Soviets, the fighter, operating in primitive conditions and against vastly superior numbers, Finnish D.XXIs racked up an incredible score against the Red Air Force. The D.XXI also has the distinction of producing the first 'ace in a single mission' in World War 2, when then 1Lt Jorma Sarvanto shot down six Ilyushin DB-3 bombers on 6 January 1940. Kari Stenman and Peter de Jong chart the history of the planes and their aces. After spending a year providing home defence and flying coastal patrols during the early stages of the Continuation War in 1941, all surviving Finnish Fokker D.XXIs were relegated to the reconnaissance role, which they performed through to the end of hostilities in September 1944.

This is the first textbook to include the matrix continued-fraction method, which is very effective in dealing with simple Fokker-Planck equations having two variables. Other methods covered are the simulation method, the eigen-function expansion, numerical integration, and the variational method. Each solution is applied to the statistics of a simple laser model and to Brownian motion in potentials. The whole is rounded off with a supplement containing a short review of new material together with some recent references. This new study edition will prove to be very useful for graduate students in physics, chemical physics, and electrical engineering, as well as for research workers in these fields.