The Secret Life of Turbulent Fluids (Vincent Martinez, Caltech)

Abstract: Turbulence influences our lives in a multitude of ways, ranging from the mundane (when we stir milk into our coffee) to the spectacular (the formation of galaxies). It is a great achievement of the human intellect that we are able to locate fundamental mechanisms shared by phenomenon with such a dramatic difference in scale and subsequently study them abstractly through mathematics. This talk will present some of the ways for how fluids and turbulent motion can be studied mathematically and introduce a few interesting problems, both theoretical and practical, of ongoing scientific relevance.