Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

178 CHAPTER 38. BOUNDARY LAYER: PRANDTL
him in solving difficult mathematical problems. But his ability to establish
systems of simplified equations which expressed the essential physical relations
and dropped the nonessentials was unique, I believe, even when compared
with his great predecessors in the field of mechanics men like Leonhard
Euler and d’Alembert.
38.3 Prandtl and the Nobel Prize
• Prandtl was never awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in fluid dynamics
because rumor had it that the Committee was reluctant to award the prize
for work in classical physics.
38.4 John D. Anderson [2]
• During the week of 8 August 1904, a small group of mathematicians and
scientists gathered in picturesque Heidelberg, Germany, for the Third International
Mathematics Congress.
• One of the presenters at the congress was Ludwig Prandtl, a 29-year-old professor
at the Technische Hochschule (equivalent to a US technical university)
in Hanover. Prandtls presentation was only 10 minutes long, but that was
all the time needed to describe a new concept that would revolutionize the
understanding and analysis of fluid dynamics.
• His presentation introduced the concept of the boundary layer in a fluid flow
over a surface. The companion paper, entitled ‘On the Motion of Fluids with
Very Little Friction, was only eight pages long, but it would prove to be one
of the most important fluid dynamics papers ever written.
• In 2005, concurrent with the World Year of Physics celebration of, among
other things, Albert Einstein and his famous papers of 1905, we should also
celebrate the 100th anniversary of Prandtls seminal paper. The modern world
of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics is still dominated by Prandtl’s idea.
• By every right, his boundary layer concept was worthy of the Nobel Prize.
• Prandtls idea went virtually unnoticed by anybody outside of Gottingen for
several years, the aerodynamics community paid little attention, especially
outside of Germany. Finally in 1921, with Theodore von Karman, a former
student of Prandtl’s, the boundary-layer theory finally began to receive more
attention and acceptance in the technical community. Since the mid 1920s,