Colleagues and former students of Aerospace Engineering Professor Philip Roe met for a small conference at Roe’s alma mater, the University of Cambridge, on July 4th and 5th, 2018. The subject of the conference was Professor Roe’s main research area of computational fluid dynamics, but the attendees also took the opportunity to celebrate their colleague and former teacher’s 80th birthday. The attendees represented an international investment in the field: researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and South Korea were present.
As a result of discussions at the conference, Professor Roe has committed to two new lines of investigation. The first is a renewed collaboration with Dr. ZJ Wang, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas. Professor Roe explains that this inquiry, “one of the most critical areas of current research,” will examine “numerical aspects of methods to predict turbulent flow by simplifying the treatment of the smallest scales.”
The second line of research will be a collaboration with Haran Jackson, a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge, who is investigating a unified model of continuum dynamics applicable to both fluid and solid behavior. On this study, Professor Roe comments: “There are some interesting geometrical issues connected with this that connect with work that I did on the motion of magnetised fluids, and [Jackson and I] intend to follow through on this.”
Also in attendance was Professor Roe’s son, Gerard, who gave a presentation showing how the predictions of models for climate change can be reproduced by a pair of simple gradient equations. The proceedings of the conference will be published a special issue of the journal Communications on Applied Mathematics and Computation.
