A Century of Turbulence

Abstract
This paper presents a summary of research on fluid dynamics over the past 100 years. From the very beginning, there have been two major threads in turbulence research. The first concerned the calculation of the practical effects of turbulence, primarily the momentum, heat and mass transfer, associated with the design of devices and their interaction with their environment. The other concerned the physics of the turbulence phenomenon. Both these threads were present in the initial work of Boussinesq and of Reynolds. They are still with us. The practical thread really was two threads, one is technological, and the other geophysical. The geophysical branch might well be called atmospheric and oceanic engineering, since it is motivated by a desire to calculate the effects of turbulence in order to predict the behavior of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena, in which turbulence is only one of many players. A fundamental desire to understand turbulence is not always a basic motivation.

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