Keith Stewartson

Keith Stewartson (born September 20, 1925 in Barnsley , † May 7, 1983 in London ) was a British applied mathematician .

Stewartson grew up as the son of a baker in Billingham , County Durham . He studied with a scholarship from 1942 mathematics at St Catharine's College of the University of Cambridge , interrupted by the Second World War, during which he worked on the aerodynamics of the targets of bombs and aerodynamics of compressible gases and liquids under rocket research. In 1946 he continued his studies at Cambridge and specialized in hydrodynamics. In 1949 there was a first publication on boundary layer theory in the compressible case and in the same year he received his doctorate with Leslie Howarth . He was then a lecturer at the University of Bristol . In 1953/54 he was at Caltech and on his return became a reader in Bristol . In 1958 he became a professor at the University of Durham and in 1964 at University College London . He died of a heart attack.

He dealt with hydrodynamics and gas dynamics, for example boundary layer theory, shear flow, magnetohydrodynamics, rotating liquids. Stewartson not only worked analytically, but also used numerical computer methods in hydrodynamics early on. He published 186 scientific papers. He had been married since 1953 and had a daughter and two sons. He played the piano and was active in rowing both in figure eight at university and as a coach.

In 1964 he was one of the founders of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications with James Lighthill , with Stewartson as Vice President under Lighthill. In 1980 he was John von Neumann Lecturer . In 1965 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1969 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Keith Stewartson. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• biography