| Philip Saffman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Philip Geoffrey Saffman 19 March 1931 Leeds, England |
| Died | 17 August 2008 (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]
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]
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]