Philip Saffman

Philip Saffman
Born	Philip Geoffrey Saffman 19 March 1931(1931-03-19) Leeds, England
Died	17 August 2008(2008-08-17) (aged 77) Los Angeles, California, USA
Fields	Fluid dynamics
Institutions	California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Cambridge University
Doctoral advisor	George Batchelor
Known for	Vortex dynamics
Notable awards	Otto Laporte Award (1994)

Philip Geoffrey Saffman (March 19, 1931 – August 17, 2008) was an applied mathematician, the Theodore von Karman Professor of Applied Mathematics and Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology.^[1][2]

Life, career and honors

Saffman was born in Leeds, England, and educated at Cambridge University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1956.^[3] He joined the Caltech faculty in 1964 and was named the Von Karman Professor in 1995. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society, and the recipient of the American Physical Society's Otto Laporte Award.^{[1][2][4][5][6]}

Saffman was survived by his wife, three children, and eight grandchildren.^[2]

Scientific work

According to Prof. Dan Meiron, Saffman “really was one of the leading figures in fluid mechanics,” and he influenced almost every subfield of that discipline. He is known (with his co-author Geoffrey Ingram Taylor) for the Saffman–Taylor instability in viscous fingering of fluid boundaries, a phenomenon important for its applications in enhanced oil recovery, and for the Saffman–Delbrück model of protein diffusion in membranes which he published with his Caltech colleague and Pasadena neighbor Max Delbrück. He made important contributions to the theory of vorticity arising from the motion of ships and aircraft through water and air; his work on wake turbulence led the airlines to increase the minimum time between takeoffs of airplanes on the same runway.^[1][5][7] Saffman also studied the flow of spheroidal particles in a fluid, such as bubbles in a carbonated beverage or corpuscles in blood; his work overturned previous assumptions that inertia was an important factor in these particles' motion and showed instead that Non-Newtonian properties of fluids play a significant role.^[8]

Along with his many research papers, Saffman wrote a book, Vortex Dynamics, surveying a field to which he had been a principal contributor. Russel Caflisch writes that “This book should be read by everyone interested in vortex dynamics or fluid dynamics in general.”^[9]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Johnson, John, Jr. (August 22, 2008), "Philip Geoffrey Saffman, 1931–2008", Los Angeles Times: B6 .
2. ^ ^{a b c} "Obituary Philip G. Saffman 1931-2008", Engineering and Science (Caltech) LXXI (3): 44, Fall 
3. ^ "Philip G. Saffman". Mathematics Genealogy Project. NDSU Department of Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society.. http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=7653. Retrieved 2008-11-27. 
4. ^ "Pasadena Royal Society Selection", Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1988 .
5. ^ ^{a b} Williams, Janette (August 20, 2008), "Caltech professor, mentor Saffman dies", Pasadena Star-News, http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ci_10261182 .
6. ^ Laporte Award recipients, retrieved August 22, 2008.
7. ^ Perkins, Sid (June 22, 2002) (– ^{Scholar search}), Dangerous wake: Wing vortices yield a deadly secret, Science News, http://www.sciencenews.org/20020622/fob2.asp ^{[dead link]}.
8. ^ Stone, H. A. (2000), "Philip Saffman and viscous flow theory", Journal of Fluid Mechanics 409: 165–183, doi:10.1017/S0022112099007697 .
9. ^ Saffman, Philip G. (1992), Vortex Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521477390 . Caflisch, Russel E. (1994), "Vortex Dynamics (P. G. Saffman)", SIAM Review 36 (2): 293–297, doi:10.1137/1036074 . Vladimirov, V. A. (1993), "Vortex Dynamics by P. G. Saffman", Journal of Fluid Mechanics 256: 720–722, doi:10.1017/S0022112093212939 . Cullen, M. J. P. (1996), "Vortex dynamics, edited by P. G. Saffman", Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 122 (532): 1015–1015, Bibcode 1996QJRMS.122.1015C, doi:10.1002/qj.49712253214 .

Persondata
Name	Saffman, Philip Geoffrey
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	March 19, 1931
Place of birth	Leeds, England
Date of death	August 17, 2008
Place of death	Los Angeles, California, USA