fluid dynamics – Quanta Magazine

How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold

Jordana Cepelewicz — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:45:34 +0000

In the fall of 2014, Andrew Wilson took a front-row seat in Ken Ono’s number theory class at Emory University in Atlanta. Wilson was not only double majoring in applied math and physics, he was a walk-on member of Emory’s swim team. Ono took an interest in Wilson’s ambitions. “We thought that together, maybe we could use our interest in mathematics to help him improve as a swimmer,” Ono said. Ono...

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Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue

Elise Cutts — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:53:27 +0000

Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical — except one wasn’t a video at all. It was a simulation. “I was absolutely mind-blown,” said Giomi, a biophysicist at Leiden University. “You could predict everything about the ink droplets.” The simulation was powered by...

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What Can Jellyfish Teach Us About Fluid Dynamics?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:51:55 +0000

The jellyfish that move through the seas by gently pulsing their saclike bodies may not seem to hold many secrets that would interest human engineers. But simple as the creatures are, jellyfish are masterful at harnessing and controlling the flow of the water around them, sometimes with surprising efficiency. As such, they embody sophisticated solutions to problems in fluid dynamics that engineers...

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What Causes Giant Rogue Waves?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 18:36:20 +0000

Sailors have spun yarns for centuries about gigantic rogue waves that could suddenly come out of nowhere to capsize the ships of unwary mariners. Scientists didn’t believe them because the stories seemed at odds with everything else known about waves. Then cameras and other instruments began to capture undeniable proof of the existence of rogue waves. Ton van den Bremer, an expert in fluid...

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The Year in Math

Konstantin Kakaes — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 16:00:09 +0000

We can think of a mathematician as a kind of archaeologist, painstakingly brushing dust off the hidden structures of the world. But the structures mathematicians reveal are not only durable, but also inevitable. They could never have been any other way. They are also remarkably interconnected: Though each year the mathematical frontier continues to expand as new discoveries are made...

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