Seminar

The interest in turbulent flows goes back many centuries. In the 20th century innumerable applications from aeronautics to atmospheric and oceanic circulation have been the major driving force for progress, and based on scaling predictions of Kolmogorov in 1941 (K41) and to Onsager’s 1949 criterion for anomalous energy dissipation we have had the beginnings of a theoretical understanding. However, from experiments and numerical simulations in the last forty years, it is now clear that simple K41 scale invariance is broken, and turbulent flows have so far been modelled mostly using ad hoc probabilistic models. In this lecture I will describe recent important advances in the mathematical ab initio understanding of turbulence which are rapidly leading to a paradigm shift.