Person: Batchelor, George Keith
George Batchelor was an Australian applied mathematician who worked in fluid dynamics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Batchelor graduated from Melbourne University in 1940, continuing to obtain a Master's Degree in 1941.
- At this time Batchelor wrote his first paper, which appeared in 1944, Interference in a wind tunnel of octagonal section which gave a mathematical deduction of the interference on a model of small wing span suspended at the centre of a tunnel of octagonal section.
- The leading British expert on turbulence was Geoffrey Taylor, and Batchelor wrote to him at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge offering to work for him.
- Batchelor and his colleague Alan Townsend arranged funding to allow them to undertake research with Geoffrey Taylor.
- in January 1945, together with his wife, Wilma, also of Melbourne, Batchelor embarked on a marathon ten-week voyage via New Zealand, the Panama Canal and New York, and thence in a convoy of 80 ships across the Atlantic to reach Cambridge.
- Arriving in Cambridge Batchelor and Townsend discovered that Geoffrey Taylor was no longer interested in undertaking his own turbulence research, but he was happy to supervise them.
- Batchelor began to examine Kolmogorov's approach to turbulence and in 1946 he presented his interpretation of Kolmogorov's work to the Sixth International Congress for Applied Mechanics in Paris.
- Batchelor was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1947 and in the following year he was awarded his doctorate and became a Cambridge University lecturer.
- Batchelor was awarded the Adams Prize by the University of Cambridge in 1951.
- Certainly Batchelor stamped his personality on the Cambridge Department.
- In 1957 Batchelor was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society of London and then in 1959 he became a Reader in Fluid Dynamics at Cambridge.
- In May 1956 Batchelor founded the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and he edited the journal until January 1999.
- Among the many honours which Batchelor received was election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959), to the Polish Academy of Sciences (1974), to the French Academy of Sciences (1984), and to the Royal Society of London in 1959 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences (1989).
Born 8 March 1920, Melbourne, Australia. Died 30 March 2000, Cambridge, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Australia
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
