In 1949, in an unpublished report to the U.S. Office of Naval Research, John von Neumann remarked of turbulence that

Few people today would disagree with these comments on the importance of understanding turbulence and, as implied, of its prediction. And, although the turbulence problem has still yet to be “solved,” our understanding of turbulence has significantly advanced since that time; this progress has come through a combination of theoretical studies, often ingenious experiments, and judicious numerical simulations. In addition, from this understanding, our ability to predict, or at least to model, turbulence has greatly improved; methods to predict turbulent flows using large-eddy simulation (LES) are the main focus of the present book.

The impact of von Neumann is still felt today in the prediction of turbulent flows, both in his work on numerical methods and in the people and the research he has influenced. The genesis of the method of large-eddy simulation (or possibly more appropriately, “simulation des grandes échelles”) was in the early 1960s with the research of Joe Smagorinsky. At the time, Smagorinsky was working in von Neumann's group at Princeton, developing modeling for dissipation and diffusion in numerical weather prediction.