As a follow on of thr previous post, Let discuss:

*-----------------------------------------* | Who are the greatest scientists in CFD? | *-----------------------------------------*

How about: 1) Courant (for Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy number) 2) Harten (for TVD-type scheme) 3) Roe (for Roe average and approximate Riemann Solver) ......

Or to answer that, shall we limit to different periods/subfields, say, 1900-1950, 1951-1975, 1976-2000, 2001-now?

-Ma

Let me add a few to that list:

Anthony Jameson - The guy whose methods made CFD a useful tool for the aerospace business.

Suhas V. Patankar - The guy who popularised SIMPLE, a revolution in incompressible CFD.

Brian Spalding - The guy who made CFD a commercial tool. Everyone I have met who knows Brian admire him.

Brian Launder - One of many guru's of turbulence modeling.

Peter Bradshaw - Always there with the right theory to correct us when we do something wrong.

Chandrashekhar. PG Drazin

in hydrodynamic stability.

I've heard a number of 'discussions' regarding whether Spalding or Harlow is the grandfather of modern CFD.

Don't forget one of the great-grandfathers!

J. von Neumann.

1) He was deeply involved in the definition process of how a "computing machine" should work prior to the build of the first computers.

2) He was one of the important contributors to the mathematical theory of scientific numerical computation.

3) from a strict CFD point of view, his articles from the 40's are most interesting. For instance, he suggested using a variational approach to solve the NS equations. Another point is the extra viscosity he added to stabilize its computations. It seems that Smagorinsky's awareness of von Neumann's works was the starting point of its proposal for a SGS model.

In the late 1940's von Neuman and Charney and co-workers performed the first CFD calculation for predicting the weather. Also related to weather prediction is the work of Richardson.

Numerical boundary layer calculations were also being performed in the 1940's (by Howarth, if I recall correctly, among others).

why not Sir Horrace Lamb?

What about Lax, father of some very important theorems?

Pierre louis lions

This french scientist is the single person in the world who won a fields medal,in applied mathematics, the equivalent of the Nobel price.

His has contributed in many field:

-fluid mechanics (hi wrote two books in navier-stokes problem). -he is one one of the leaders incomputational chemistery. -he made a new formalism (multi- scale analysis), for the image processing. -in optimal control he had introduced the concept of viscosity solutions. -in statistical mechanics (a basis of conservations laws in fluid mechanics), he developped a concept of a new solutions ( renormalised solution), to proof the existence of the solution for boltzmann equation. And more....

His ability to find, new algorithms is unique.He his the master for the non linear equations!!!

He is able to atack the problems, both with the eye of mathematician, with high level of abstraction, (his books in fluid mechanics are quite hard!!), or with the eye of physician).

This unique advantage gives him the possiblity of the unique unification to dominate the PDE's.

fassi_fihri jaouad. moroccan resident in montreal, canada.

Without doubt in my mind, Sir James Lighthill is the best mathematician in Fluid Dynamics in last century.