The butterfly effect — that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas — expresses the sensitivity of a chaotic system to initial conditions. Keep reading
Tag: Navier-Stokes Equations
Abel Prize Winner Luis Caffarelli
Tomorrow mathematician Luis Caffarelli will receive the Abel Prize — one of the highest honors in mathematics — in part for his work in fluid dynamics. Caffarelli is one of Keep reading
An Introduction to the Reynolds Number
For those who’d like an overview of the mathematics involved in fluid dynamics, Numberphile has a lovely introduction, given by our friend Tom Crawford. The governing equations in fluid dynamics, Keep reading
Solution to a Millennium Prize Problem?
Reports emerged this weekend that Kazakh mathematician Mukhtarbay Otelbaev has published a proposed solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems offered by Keep reading
Incense in Transition
A buoyant plume of smoke rises from a stick of incense. At first the plume is smooth and laminar, but even in quiescent air, tiny perturbations can sneak into the Keep reading
Osborne Reynolds and Transition
How and when flow through a pipe becomes turbulent has been a conundrum for fluid mechanicians since the days of Osbourne Reynolds (~1870s): Typically, the laminar-to-turbulence transition is studied mathematically Keep reading