George Keith Batchelor

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George Keith Batchelor (born March 8, 1920 in Melbourne , † March 30, 2000 in Cambridge ) was an Australian mathematician and physicist who was a leading international scientist in fluid mechanics .

Live and act

Batchelor attended Essendon and Melbourne High Schools . He then studied mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne with a bachelor's degree in 1940 and a master's degree in 1941. During the Second World War , he worked at the Australian Aeronautical Research Laboratory on flow problems of aircraft engines . The work he did there sparked his interest in fluid mechanics, which occupied him all his life from now on. At the Aeronautical Research Laboratory he came to believe that turbulence was the most important problem to be solved in fluid mechanics, and he published on the interaction of model aircraft with wind tunnels and hydrodynamic drag. The leading British expert on turbulence was Geoffrey Ingram Taylor , so Batchelor wrote to Taylor, who worked at the Cavendish Laboratory , Cambridge, and received an invitation in 1945. He researched homogeneous turbulence according to Andrei Kolmogorow and presented the results at the sixth international congress for mechanics in 1948.

He became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1947, received his doctorate in 1948, and received the Adams Prize in 1951 . In 1948 he founded a research seminar on hydrodynamics in Cambridge, which met regularly at four thirty on Fridays. In 1959 he became a Reader in Hydrodynamics at Cambridge and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. In 1964 he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge.

He wrote a standard work on fluid mechanics (An introduction to fluid mechanics, first 1967) and research monographs on turbulence. In 1956 he founded the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, of which he was editor until 1999. In addition to scientific quality, he also insisted on clarity of presentation. Batchelor was editor of the collected works of his teacher GI Taylor.

Honors

1957 Batchelor was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1988 awarded him the Royal Medal . In 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Académie des Sciences (1984) and the National Academy of Sciences (1994) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences . Batchelor is the winner of the Tymoshenko Medal in 1988. In 1997 he received the GI Taylor Medal and in 1986 the Agostinelli Prize of the Accademia dei Lincei .

He has received several honorary doctorates (Grenoble, Technical University of Denmark, McGill University, University of Michigan, University of Melbourne, University of Stockholm).

Works

  • The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence , Cambridge UP 1953, Reprint 1982
  • with AA Townsend: Turbulent Diffusion , Cambridge UP 1956
  • An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics . Cambridge Mathematical Library series, Cambridge University Press, 1967, 2000. ISBN 0521663962 .
  • Editor with HK Moffatt , MG Worster: Perspectives in fluid dynamics , Cambridge UP 2002

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Batchelor, George Keith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 2000
Place of death Cambridge , England