Biography

Walter Munk was born on October 19, 1917 in Vienna, Austria. He was married to Mary Coakley, Judith Horton and Mary Chapin. He died on February 8, 2019 in La Jolla, California, USA.

He attended the California Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in geophysics, and UCLA, where he received a PhD in oceanography.

He was a prominent oceanographer who worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. He devoted his career to research on where waves begin, why they break violently or wash ashore gently, and how sound travels thousands of miles through water. During WWII, he worked for the US Navy in the development of wave forecasting, which military strategists used in planning the amphibious landing on North Africa in 1942, the Normandy invasion in 1944, and in the Pacific.