Professor John Richard Ockendon FRS (born c. 1940) is an applied mathematician noted especially for his contribution to fluid dynamics and novel applications of mathematics to real world problems. He is a professor at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

and an

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Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

St Catherine's College, Oxford St Catherine's College (colloquially called St Catz or Catz) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford and is the newest college admitting both undergraduate and graduate students. Tracing its roots back to 1868 (although th ...

, the first director of the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM) and a former director of the Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics and System Engineering.

Education

Ockendon was educated at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

where he was awarded a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common Academic degree, degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields ...

degree in 1965 for research on

fluid dynamics In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids— liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) an ...

supervised by

Alan B Tayler Alan Breach Tayler (1931–1995) was a British applied mathematician and pioneer of "industrial mathematics". He was a Founding Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford (1959-1995), the initiator of the Oxford Study Groups with Industry in 1968 ...

Research and career

His initial fluid mechanics interests included hypersonic aerodynamics, creeping flow, sloshing and channel flows and leading to flows in porous media, ship hydrodynamics and models for flow separation. He moved on to free and moving boundary problems. He pioneered the study of diffusion-controlled moving boundary problems in the 1970s his involvement centring on models for phase changes and elastic contact problems all built around the paradigm of the Hele-Shaw free boundary problem. Other industrial collaboration has led to new ideas for lens design, fibre manufacture, extensional and surface-tension- driven flows and glass manufacture, fluidised-bed models, semiconductor device modelling and a range of other problems in mechanics and heat and mass transfer, especially scattering and ray theory, nonlinear wave propagation, nonlinear oscillations, nonlinear diffusion and impact in solids and liquids. His efforts to promote mathematical collaboration with industry led him to organise annual meetings of the ''Study Groups with Industry'' from 1972 to 1989.

Awards and honours

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, and awarded the

Gold Medal A gold medal is a medal awarded for highest achievement in a non-military field. Its name derives from the use of at least a fraction of gold in form of plating or alloying in its manufacture. Since the eighteenth century, gold medals have bee ...

of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 2006.

Personal life

Ockendon is married to coauthor and colleague

Hilary Ockendon Hilary Ockendon is a British mathematician who worked at the University of Oxford until retirement in 2008. Her research focuses on applications of mathematics with a particular interest in continuum models for industrial problems. She is an e ...

. In ''

Who's Who ''Who's Who'' (or ''Who is Who'') is the title of a number of reference publications, generally containing concise biography, biographical information on the prominent people of a country. The title has been adopted as an expression meaning a gr ...

'' he lists his recreations as mathematical modelling, bird watching, Hornby-Dublo model trains and old sports cars.

References

Fellows of the Royal Society Living people 1940s births 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Fellows of St Catherine's College, Oxford Fluid dynamicists {{UK-mathematician-stub