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1 - Osborne Reynolds: a turbulent life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2011

By
Brian Launder  and
Derek Jackson
Edited by
Peter A. Davidson ,
Yukio Kaneda ,
Keith Moffatt  and
Katepalli R. Sreenivasan
Brian Launder
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Derek Jackson
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Peter A. Davidson
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Yukio Kaneda
Affiliation:
Nagoya University, Japan
Keith Moffatt
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Katepalli R. Sreenivasan
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

Introduction

Scope

Articles on Osborne Reynolds' academic life and published works have appeared in a number of publications beginning with a remarkably perceptive anonymous obituary notice published in Nature within eight days of his death (on 21 February 1912) and a more extensive account written by Horace Lamb, FRS, and published by the Royal Society (Lamb, 1913) about a year later. More recent reviews have been provided by Gibson (1946), a student of Reynolds and later an academic colleague, by Allen (1970), who provided the opening article in a volume marking the passage of 100 years from Reynolds taking up his chair appointment at Manchester in 1868, and by Jackson (1995), in an issue of Proc. Roy. Soc. celebrating the centenary of the publication of Reynolds' 1895 paper on what we now call the Reynolds decomposition of the Navier–Stokes equations, about which more will be said later in the present chapter. A significant portion of the present account is therefore devoted to Reynolds' family and background and to hitherto unreported aspects of his character to enable his contributions as a scientist and engineer to be viewed in the context of his life as a whole. While inevitably some of what is presented here on his academic work will be known to those who have read the articles cited above, archive material held by the University of Manchester and The Royal Society and other material brought to light in the writers' personal enquiries provide new perspectives on parts of his career.

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A Voyage Through Turbulence , pp. 1 - 39
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

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