Dr. Cathleen Morawetz passed away a week ago Tuesday. She wasn’t someone I had ever met or heard of before the Times published her obit, but she sounds like an incredibly neat person that I wish I had known.
Much of Dr. Morawetz’s research centered on equations that describe the motion of fluids and waves — in water, sound, light and vibrating solids. One of her first notable papers helped explain the flow of air around airplanes flying close to the speed of sound.
…
Wings can be designed so that transonic airflow remains smooth at certain speeds without generating shock waves. But Dr. Morawetz’s work demonstrated that such shock-free wings do not work in the real world. The slightest perturbation — an imperfection in the shape, a tilt in the angle of the wing, a gust of wind — disrupts the smooth flow.
I wonder if there’s a relationship between this and chaos theory, but this is way outside anything I’ve ever studied.
In later work Dr. Morawetz studied the scattering of waves off objects. She invented a method to prove what is known as the Morawetz inequality, which describes the maximum amount of wave energy near an object at a given time. It proves that wave energy scatters rather than lingering near the object indefinitely.
She was 94.
In addition to her husband, Dr. Morawetz is survived by three daughters, Pegeen Rubinstein, Lida Jeck and Nancy Morawetz; a son, John; a sister, Isabel Seddon; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2017 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Geek, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Thankfully, she made a substantial contribution to the gene pool.