Keith Moffatt Wins 2018 Fluid Dynamics Prize

Keith Moffatt of the University of Cambridge has won the American Physical Society’s 2018 Fluid Dynamics Prize. The annual prize is intended to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in fluid dynamics research. The prize consists of $10,000, an allowance for registration, and travel to the 71st Annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, which will take place November 18-20, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Fluid Dynamics Prize citation honors Moffatt for "profound, elegant, and lasting contributions to fluid mechanics, including turbulence, Stokes flows, topological fluid mechanics, interfacial flows, and self-similarity."

Keith Moffatt graduated with an M.Sc. from Edinburgh University, UK in 1957, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1962. In collaboration with Emmanuel Dormy, Moffatt is currently completing a book, “Self-Exciting Fluid Dynamos”, to be published in 2019. He is engaged in research on the Navier-Stokes finite-time singularity problem, and has continuing interest in astrophysical and geophysical magnetohydrodynamics, topological fluid dynamics, soap film dynamics and, most recently, robot dynamics. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as being a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an elected member of Academia Europæa, and a Foreign Member of the Académie des Sciences, Paris, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Eindhoven, the State University of New York at Utica, and the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France. He received Cambridge University’s 1960 Smith's Prize, the 2001 Panetti-Ferrari International Prize and Gold Medal, the 2003 Euromech Prize in Fluid Mechanics, the 2005 Senior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society, the 2005 Royal Society Hughes Medal, and the 2009 David Crighton Medal (Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and the London Mathematical Society).

The Fluid Dynamics Prize was established in 1979 with support from the Office of Naval Research. In 2004, the Otto Laporte Award was combined with the Fluid Dynamics Prize so that the Division of Fluid Dynamics would have a single major prize — the Fluid Dynamics Prize. The prize is now supported by the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, friends of Otto Laporte, and the American Institute of Physics journal Physics of Fluids.