Uriel Frisch (born in

Agen The commune of Agen (, ; ) is the prefecture of the Lot-et-Garonne department in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, southwestern France. It lies on the river Garonne southeast of Bordeaux. Geography The city of Agen lies in the southwestern department ...

, in France, on December 10, 1940) is a French

mathematical physicist Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developmen ...

known for his work 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 ...

and

turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...

Biography

From 1959 to 1963 Frisch was a student at the

École Normale Supérieure École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, S ...

. Early in his graduate studies, he became interested in turbulence, under the mentorship of Robert Kraichnan, a former assistant to

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

. Frisch earned a Ph.D. in 1967 from the

University of Paris , image_name = Coat of arms of the University of Paris.svg , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of Arms , latin_name = Universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisiensis , motto = ''Hic et ubique terrarum'' (Latin) , mottoeng = Here and a ...

, and since then he has worked at the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

(CNRS). He retired in 2006, and became a director of research emeritus at CNRS.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2012-03-05. Frisch's wife Hélène is also a physicist, and the grand daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy.

Research

Frisch is the author of a 1995 book on turbulence and of over 200 research publications. One of his most cited works, published in 1986, concerns the lattice gas automaton method of simulating fluid dynamics using a

cellular automaton A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tesse ...

. The method used until that time, the

HPP model The Hardy–Pomeau–Pazzis (HPP) model is a fundamental lattice gas automaton for the simulation of gases and liquids. It was a precursor to the lattice Boltzmann methods. From lattice gas automata, it is possible to derive the macroscopic Navier ...

, simulated particles moving in axis-parallel directions in a square lattice, but this model was unsatisfactory because it obeyed unwanted and unphysical

conservation law In physics, a conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves over time. Exact conservation laws include conservation of energy, conservation of linear momentum, c ...

s (the

conservation of momentum In Newtonian mechanics, momentum (more specifically linear momentum or translational momentum) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If is an object's mass an ...

within each axis-parallel line). Frisch and his co-authors

Brosl Hasslacher Brosl Hasslacher (May 13, 1941 – November 11, 2005) was a theoretical physicist. Brosl Hasslacher obtained a bachelor's in physics from Harvard University in 1962. He did his Ph.D. with D.Z. Freeman and Yang Chen-Ning, C.N. Yang at the State Uni ...

and

Yves Pomeau Yves Pomeau, born in 1942, is a French mathematician and physicist, emeritus research director at the CNRS and corresponding member of the French Academy of sciences. He was one of the founders of thLaboratoire de Physique Statistique, École No ...

introduced a model using instead the

hexagonal lattice The hexagonal lattice or triangular lattice is one of the five two-dimensional Bravais lattice types. The symmetry category of the lattice is wallpaper group p6m. The primitive translation vectors of the hexagonal lattice form an angle of 120° ...

which became known as the FHP model after the initials of its inventors and which much more accurately simulated the behavior of actual fluids. Frisch is also known for his work with

Giorgio Parisi Giorgio Parisi (born 4 August 1948) is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densit ...

on the analysis of the fine structure of turbulent flows, for his early advocacy of

multifractal system A multifractal system is a generalization of a fractal system in which a single exponent (the fractal dimension) is not enough to describe its dynamics; instead, a continuous spectrum of exponents (the so-called singularity spectrum) is needed ...

s in modeling physical processes, and for his research on using transportation theory to reconstruct the distribution of matter in the early universe.

Awards and honors

Frisch won the Peccot Prize of the Collège de France for his doctoral thesis in 1967, the Bazin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985, and the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal of the

European Geosciences Union The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is a non-profit international union in the fields of Earth, planetary, and space sciences whose vision is to "realise a sustainable and just future for humanity and for the planet." The organisation has hea ...

"for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of turbulence" in 2003. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2008.Les Membres de l’Académie des sciences élus en 2008 et 2009
retrieved 2012-03-05. He is an Officier of the

Ordre national du Mérite The Ordre national du Mérite (; en, National Order of Merit) is a French order of merit with membership awarded by the President of the French Republic, founded on 3 December 1963 by President Charles de Gaulle. The reason for the order's estab ...

and the recipient of the 2010 Modesto Panetti e Carlo Ferrari prize. In 2020 he has been awarded with the prize EUROMECH, provided by the European Mechanics Society.

Selected publications

*. * *

References

External links