Friday 2 October 2009

Keith Moffatt awarded 2009 David Crighton Medal

Keith Moffatt
Professor Keith Moffatt FRS of Cambridge University has been awarded the 2009 David Crighton Medal by the LMS and the IMA. You can read about Professor Moffatt's work on the LMS website (follow the link "Prizes").

Two colleagues at Greenwich have expressed particular pleasure at the announcement.
Professor Ed Galea of our Fire Safety Engineering Group says "This is wonderful news. Much of my PhD was based around the work of Keith Moffatt. I can remember spending months trying to understand some of the work in his papers on magnetohydrodynamics and star formation. And when I finally did understand it I thought how elegant and simple it was, which made me feel both immensely pleased and immensely stupid at the same time!"

Valdis Bojarevics, Reader in our Computational Science and Engineering Group, says, "Good news indeed! This jiggles my memory to one of the first encounters with this remarkable man back in 1981 when I was demonstrating to the prominent visitor, Prof. Keith Moffatt, a rotating vortex generation in a mercury experiment passing a thousand amperes current. As usual the so called 'generals' effect happened, and the thing did not work initially as expected: the 'pinch' effect with a loud bang and splashing of the weak acid solution on top of the mercury. We ended both hiding at the bottom of the experimental table... Keith was so impressed, that we were invited to publish this in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics ( he was the editor at that time), [V.Bojarevics, E.Shcherbinin. Azimuthal rotation in the axisymmetric meridional flow due to an electric current source. - Journal of Fluid Mechanics, (1983) vol. 126, 413.] I met him on several occasions, his talks are always the top attraction at the conferences. His publications are available online at http://www.igf.fuw.edu.pl/KB/HKM/"

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