A Voyage Through Turbulence

Description

Turbulence is widely recognized as one of the outstanding problems of the physical sciences, but it still remains only partially understood despite having attracted the sustained efforts of many leading scientists for well over a century. In A Voyage Through Turbulence we are transported through a crucial period of the history of the subject via biographies of twelve of its great personalities, starting with Osborne Reynolds and his pioneering work of the 1880s. This book will provide absorbing reading for every scientist, mathematician and engineer interested in the history and culture of turbulence, as background to the intense challenges that this universal phenomenon still presents.

Peter A. Davidson is Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Yukio Kaneda is Professor in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering at the Graduate School of Engineering, University of Nagoya, Japan. Keith Moffatt is Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Katepalli R. Sreenivasan is University Professor in the Department of Physics and the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

"I highly recommend A Voyage Through Turbulence to all scientists, engineers, historians and philosophers of science, students, and to even the broader readership of anyone who is interested in the onset and nurturing of creative thoughts. Turbulence connoisseurs will savor devouring the book, but even the non-specialists will still get something utilitarian out of it." Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, AIAA Journal "I greatly enjoyed reading this book. It succeeds admirably in combining introductions to the original ideas and observations of celebrated 20th century scientists together with their biographies, some written by authors who knew their subjects personally." Jonathan Healey, Mathematical Reviews