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Gordon Arthur Riley, oceanographer (born 1 June 1911 in Webb City, Missouri; died 7 Oct 1985 in Halifax, NS). A pioneer of quantitative biological oceanography, Riley became the director of Dalhousie's Institute of Oceanography (later the Department of Oceanography) in 1965 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Career
Originally an embryologist, Gordon Arthur Riley began graduate work at Yale in 1934 and then, influenced by the ecologist G.E. Hutchinson, switched to limnology. His work at sea, based at Yale and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, began in 1937. Riley used experimental methods and statistics to determine the causes of biological processes in the sea. In the 1940s, he began to use differential equations, beginning quantitative modelling in biological oceanography. Later, he worked on regional oceanography, transport and mixing, and particles in seawater, showing the same originality that had characterized his earlier work. At Dalhousie, Riley built a school of oceanography whose graduates work throughout North America.
