Hi, and welcome to the Neil Ashton Podcast.
In each episode, we explained some of the fascinating ways
that science and engineering are changing the world around us.
We talked to leading engineers from elite level sports like
cycling and Formula One to some of the world's top academics to
understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning, supercomputing
are bringing in a new era of discovery.
We also hear some of their life stories, their career advice,
the lessons they've learned on the way that I hope will be
helpful to you too. So sit back and enjoy this
episode. Hi, and welcome back to the new
Ashton podcast today. I think it's a pretty special
episode. It's with really one of the
icons of CFD, Professor Ansi Jamieson.
It really is somebody who I'd always known about, you know,
from the early days of me studying CFD and speaking to
various people, it was clear that he was somebody who was a
real pioneer. But I have to completely confess
that I was I was learning a lot through the conversation I had
with him. And as I was going through it, I
was blown away by what he has done and what what it has led to
it. It's pretty incredible that he
was there at the beginning of both the use of computational
fluid dynamics, but also the early days of computing, the
early days of really the aeronautics, aeronautics, the
move to transonic, the sort of evolution in aircraft design.
And IT it's amazing. And I purposely have released it
today, which is his 90th birthday.
And so I consider this an episode to really celebrate the
life and career of Professor Anthony Jameson.
Just very briefly to summarize, he had incredible back story
going into the British Army, being an officer in the British
Army, living around the world in India, Malaya, studying at
Cambridge, then moving over to to the US, working with some of
the defense companies and aerospace companies, writing
code, then moving to become a professor in New York, then
eventually going to Princeton. But really the overall and later
then he went to Stanford and he's now at Texas A&M.
But what blows my mind is one, his intellect, he's just the way
you can hear and speak about things.
But also the fact that when you appreciate what he was writing
these codes decades before any of the codes that we today take
for granted, the commercial codes, the government codes.
And you really can see that it, it really, I, I don't think it's
too far of a stretch of imagination to say he was one of
the key people that is responsible for modern day CFD.
There's not many people who can say that it's, it's incredible.
And yeah, he, he's known for certain certain things, you
know, like adjoint methods, maybe for aircraft design or
the, or some of the, the JST scheme shock capturing.
But I think that that culture of writing the code, getting in, in
the very early days, working with industry closely, he was
not a pure academic nor a pure industry.
It was clear that he was always moving between and you know, as
we discussed a little bit, but probably didn't focus on too
much. Just the sheer number of people
that he has supervised and mentored who have gone on to do
amazing things as top professors and and engineers throughout the
world is a real testament to what he has done.
Now this is a completely unedited, this is a more than
two hour long conversation and I purposely kept it this way to
not take anything away from what his his life story is.
There was far many more things we could have spoken about but I
wanted to be respectful of of his time.
I will put some links in into the chat.
If you're watching this on, on YouTube, it's probably one that
maybe will take you a few times to go through because, you know,
like I said, it's more than two hours long.
But yeah, I, I just have incredible honour of being able
to, to speak to him. And I want to thank him.
And hopefully I can say that on behalf of everybody else to
thank him for his amazing contribution to the field of
computational fluid dynamics, computational aerodynamics and
scientific computing. So sit back and enjoy this
episode with Professor Anthony Jameson.
So, so where did it, where did it all all begin?
So did you have, were you one of these children who were always
into aircraft from a very young age, or was this something that
that took age? How did this love of aircraft
and and later fluid dynamics begin?
Well, so actually there's more boys.
So I can tell you the following story, and of course it's just
my memory, but my father was a British Army officer, so I think
he was sent to India in 1938 when I was three years old, and
he spent six months in Bombay. But then he was attached to the
headquarters of the British Army.
Remember, there was an Indian army, but there was also
contingents of the British Army in India.
So the headquarters is in Delhi. But because Delhi is very hot
during the summer, they moved to this summer.
Capital similar, which is at foothills of the similarities at
7000 feet. So somewhere around when I was
perhaps I've also had a nanny at this point and she took my
brother and me. I have a brother who was one
year younger than me, but born on the same day as me.
On a walk in Delhi. We went past a small airport,
which I'm sure doesn't exist anymore, and there was a, a
biplane there, a twin engined biplane, something like a
Vicar's Valletta if you want, but I don't know exactly what it
was. But it had by playing with
sticks and strings all over the place and the engines in the
middle of each, between each pair of wings.
I looked at that and you know, I had been looking at birds quite
a bit and I thought this is all wrong.
You know, birds don't have all these wires and sticks and
things. But then it took another look
and I was looking at, I saw it had these movable hinge surfaces
on the wings and on the tail. And I looked at the tail and saw
that if you, I saw the wind bearing over the plane.
I can't tell you why, but I saw that if you push the elevator
up, that the wind would hit the top of the elevator and push the
tail down. And that was my first time I'd
ever really had a close view of an aircraft.
Well, I can't have been more than about six years old because
soon after that my father was sent to Iraq and my mother spent
moved to similar on a full time basis.
And we lived in similar for the next between 1940 and 43.
So my mother taught me to read and write by copying over her
handwriting. She started teaching me the
tables when I was about 7 and I told her that you don't need to
teach me this because I can work it out.
It's fairly obvious to me that you can, you know, 7 + 7 to 14
and add 7 again, it's 21. I can do that.
So at that point, my mother used to read to us.
I haven't yet gone to school. I went to school when I was 7
when my mother got pregnant at this Roman Catholic mission
school in similar, but I found an observer's sort of aircraft
spotting work with three view silhouettes of things like
Spitfires and Measure Schmidt 109 and so on.
And I persuaded my mother to buy this book for me and I forced
her to read out of this book more or less everyday sort of
wingspan, 36 feet and things like that.
So that was that. All right.
But we did. My father was spread first Iraq
and then Iran and then he was moved back to fund against
Japan, which by that time was in the not in Burma but in the
North East of India. So when I was eight we moved to
the Shalom NE of India and I went to another of these Roman
Catholic mission schools for a year.
My dad wanted to have something to do with the invasion of
Normandy and he applied to come back to England.
So we came back to England in March 1944, coming on a convoy
that went through the Mediterranean and then went way
out into the Atlantic and finally landed in Liverpool on a
horrible cold day and they managed to get into luggage vans
or some train we travelled to some.
My father's sister was living in Sherborne at the time when we
spent a few weeks there. And then I was dumped in a
boarding school, a boarding prep school.
And the reason for that particular school was that my
father actually had been a Wimbledon tennis player and also
one of the world's best squash players.
And the owner of the school was somebody else who had been on
the British national squash team that toured America in 1934.
As far as I can make out, I was actually conceived in America
during that squash tour. Anyway, I went to this boarding
prep school that would normally be in Brighton, but it was
evacuated to the Midlands during the war and well, we had I was
put in the third form. It had 6 forms, so I was nine.
I was put in the third form. But what happened was that you
could be promoted each term. And each term I came in the top
five and got promoted. So by the time I was 10, I was
actually sitting in the top form of this school.
And I sat there for the next couple of years kind of without
much to do because the teachers there, I mean, these are during
the war and they were not the only people available to teach,
were sort of retirees and so on. I think that somebody, for
example, could have built me calculus at this point, but
there was nobody at the school who probably knew calculus and
then wound up in 1940. Seven, my father applied to a
job in New York for the what was going to be the United Nations
Army, which never happened because of the Cold War.
The reason it did is that my mother was actually born in
America and we had American families.
So they went to America and they left my brother and me going to
these boarding schools in England.
And we spent our school holidays with an aunt, actually.
And I wound up getting a scholarship to Winchester in
1948. And so that kind of had a big
impact on me. I spent in Winchester courses
probably about that time considered to be the best
academic school in England probably.
And at Winchester, I wound up focusing more on physics and
chemistry, but I wound up eventually getting a scholarship
to Cambridge. Well, we had state scholarships
and county scholarships, but I also took this open scholarship
exam in Cambridge. I went to Trinity Hall because
my father had actually been sent to Cambridge for two years as an
Army officer, but asked him what college he was, he said Trinity.
And somebody at the War Office didn't know that Trinity Hall
and Trinity were two different colleges.
Said he he went to Chinterley Hall.
Sorry, decided I might as well go to the same place.
But I didn't go straight to Cambridge.
See, we had national service in those days, so out of Winchester
I went straight from the Army for two years when I was 18.
And so now there's something else that's a little bit
relevant to this. While I was at Winchester, one
of the maths teachers was Doctor Thwaites.
Thwaites actually was a quite well known expert in theoretical
aerodynamics and he he went on from Winchester to become the
chair of aeronautics at Southampton University.
Now I was never in a class taught by him, but he organised
some trip to visit Super Marine in South outside Southampton,
which is pretty near Winchester. And I told him I was really
interested in aircraft. And he told me that I ought to
read the book by Claret Airfoil and Air School Theory, which I
don't know whether you're familiar with that book or not.
So I managed to to get a copy, I'm not quite sure how.
So now when I'm in the Army, I spent several months in basic
training and then I passed this War Office selection board for
officer training. So another six months on officer
training, then you could apply to go where you want.
And I applied to go to, to Malaya was then called now
called Malaysia, right? So we went out to Malaysia,
Malaya by ship. And I had this book by glass.
I read it on the ship and I've still got that copy of the book
in very tattered form. And you can see that I've put
handwritten notes all over the place when I tried to verify the
formulas. But this, this book actually
introduces complex variables and conformal mapping.
So I actually learnt complex variables from this book and
also conformal mapping. I've also learnt 3D lifting line
wing theory of Prantle. So now I spend the year as a
Lieutenant in Malaya and I came back and my father by this time
was back in England and he knew somebody rather who had a
contact with Bristol Aero Engines.
So I spent six months from March to September working at Bristol
Aero Engines before going to Cambridge.
So I was in a compressor designed section, about 50
people and everybody else in there had a university degree.
But anyway, the first day or two somebody showed me like it was a
side rule. We didn't.
This is before electronic computing had really come in and
I went to a book. I bought a book on
thermodynamics and another one on jet engines and read them in
a hurry. As it turned out, I could do the
job. I didn't didn't need a
university degree. Then the next thing that
happened was that we were supposed to do these stage by
stage calculations as slide rules looking at data from this
Tess station which had like 25,000 horsepower electric
motors driving this and the test station blew up.
Well, the suddenly got out of balance and everything just torn
apart. So there was no data.
So it was the sort of stroke of that for me because then they
had to think of something else for me to do and I looked at
something called radial equilibrium that flows in jet
engine compressors. And then finally I actually
calculated the they were testing or had the 1st 2 spool jet
engine to superstore the Olympus that went in the Valcon and
later was adapted to the Concorde.
And they had flight test data and they didn't know what the
relative speed of the two high speed, high pressure and low
pressure compressors would be. So based on the flight
measurements of the RPM, I calculated the combined
compressor characteristic for the whole 2 spools.
So that's before I got to Cambridge.
Before, yeah, yeah, before you went to university.
All right. But by the time I got to
Cambridge, of course I knew quite a bit of basic
aerodynamics, like I also knew quite a bit about
thermodynamics. I know at Cambridge I wasn't
sure whether to try maths or physics or engineering, but
seemed like the path of minimum effort was to do what we called
mechanical sciences. At Cambridge.
When you take, if you have a scholarship, you could take
what's called a fast course admit you take the secondary
exams the end of your first year and basically your degree exam
after two years and then. The first third year you do
something wants to be a kind of post graduation, sort of like
approximately a master's degree. But but at Cambridge I was
really, I thought they weren't teaching the maths that we
needed, so they didn't teach factor analysis, for example.
And so I started buying, they were various quite inexpensive
books and I started buying these books on things like vector
analysis and tensor analysis and so on and trying to teach myself
anyway, I. Were you always a more than
maths person than an engineering?
Did you? Did you always have a a keenness
for maths? You know, in your earlier years
you said then that they didn't teach enough maths.
Do you, do you have a very mathematical brain?
Do you find maths comes very naturally?
Well, yes, I think it does, but I didn't read maths at Cambridge
and maybe I should have it actually I have a younger
brother who but actually eight years younger than me and he did
read maths at Cambridge. And so anyway, I but yeah, I'm
really interested in, well, for example, I mean for the Greeks,
you know, people think about Pythagoras theorem.
But the thing that's actually interesting to me is a
consequence of Pythagoras theorem is that if you have a
triangle with two sides of one, I mean right triangle, then the
length of third side of sqrt 2 and now there's no fraction that
when you square it can produce 2.
So you can prove that however large the fraction is.
And the Greeks already knew this and it really wasn't sorted out
until the 19th century when it had a theory for real numbers
developed. Another kind of interesting
thing is that Euclid, he's known for his geometry, but he
actually had a proof that there's no largest prime number.
So they knew there was an infinite number of primes
already, the Greeks. So this is not the kind of
question that people designing aeroplanes really usually
interested in. But I am interested in this kind
of thing, and there's certainly, which basically the theory of
what's progressively larger infinities.
There's countable numbers and then there's the real numbers
and so on. There's a theorem that the set
of all subsets is larger than the original set, which means it
could get a whole hierarchy of these transfinite numbers.
So yeah, this kind of thing continuous to interest me, but I
was also still interested in aircraft and I was very lucky in
the following sense that in England in those days, well
under the Labour government, they tried to make
opportunities, firstly for people to get into universities.
But secondly, if you got first class honours, your degree
exams, you automatically got support from the Ministry of
Education to do doctoral studies so that she would pay the full
tuition and lodging to any university who was willing to
accept you as a graduate student.
So of course I was able to take advantage of that, but I didn't
really want to to leave Cambridge.
So I had to try to find somebody inside Cambridge who doing
something that interested me. And I wound up finding Arthur
Shurcliffe, who later became well known kind of the world,
society and so on. But at the time I knew he was
only 7 years older than me and had just been made in a lecture.
He was doing Magneto hydrodynamics.
So that's what I wound up doing in my thesis.
But and then about one year into the thesis, I was lucky that I
was in kind of invited to apply for what's called a research
fellowship at Trinity Hall. So research fellows at Oxford or
Cambridge are people who are actually are on the governing
bodies of their colleagues. I mean, it's a sort of pseudo
faculty kind of position. So I had three fellowship at
Trinity Hall. Actually I had a slightly
difficult start because I had been getting my grant from the
Ministry of Education every three months and that was paid
in advance. And then as a researcher it
turned out that I was going to get paid quarterly, but in
arrears. So I had like six months and I
had to ask the advisor of the college to to give me a loan
because I, I. So the other thing is that my
advisor, Arthur Shurcliffe, so he went on an exchange to MIT my
third year as a doctoral student.
So at this point a student who was one year ahead of me became
my nominal thesis advisor and I had actually did experimental
thesis and tried to generate alphane waves in a liquid
sodium. My thesis by the way you can
find on my Stanford homepage of I wound up building A10 tonne
magnet and things like that and we needed 300 amperes of
current, 200 volts. And there was a motor generator
set from a World War and submergine in the lobby of the
engineering department. And I managed to have that moved
into the lab and use that to supply the current for this
magnet. I sort of after all this I
realised firstly I did not think I should be doing experiments.
I don't feel very uncomfortable trying to interpret sort of
pictures and the sue escapes. I didn't actually think Magneto
hydrodynamics is going anywhere in engineering, so I didn't
really know what I wanted to do. And then I had some sort of
interest in politics. I was quite upset when Macmillan
stepped down as Prime Minister and engineered this Lord Hume
becoming Prime Minister and I thought, well, maybe I should
get involved. The trade student in Congress
advertised at the time for people to work in the economics
department, and I sent you the an application and they decided
they would interview me. So I had about 3 weeks to read
as much as I could about economics in a hurry.
And then I had an interview with Len Murray, who at that time was
head of the economics department but later became general
secretary. He wound up hurrying me as an
economist working for the Trade Union Congress, and it was quite
interesting actually. They had what they called
National Economic Development Council Nettie's, which were 1/3
government, 1/3 management from industry and 1/3 union reps was
supposed to be discussing how to improve things, different
industries. So I was actually preparing the
position for the trades unions on the aircraft industry and the
electrical industry, but I knew that I wasn't going to be long
term a trade union person. I found it, it was interesting
and actually I did a kind of study of what happened to rates
of inflation versus unemployment and going back to about 1900 and
I found that interesting enough the fastest rate of inflation in
England was usually on the downside of each economic cycle.
And that's because as far as I can make out costs went up on
the downside because there was less utilisation of the
factories and so on and companies has passed the higher
cost straight on high prices. I've certainly concluded that
this idea that there's a sort of non inflationary rate of
unemployment is is wrong and actually morally wrong as well
as practically wrong in my opinion.
I mean you deliberately a high rate of unemployment in order to
prevent inflation is actually sort of a bit like human
sacrifice used to be a sort of be historic good.
You know you sacrifice somebody for the benefit of everybody
else right. But anyway, quite by chance
there was an advancement in one of the London Evening newspapers
saying that Orcas Sidley was dynamics was trying to looking
for engineers and they would have some representatives of the
company in a hotel. Happened to me about 5 minutes
walk from the Trades Union Congress.
So I decided I might as well walk in there around about 5 in
the evening at the end of the day and had a very weird
interview. So there were two people in the
room. Marathon said what do you think
I can do? I said I think I can do
aerodynamics. The other guy said well what are
you doing now? I said, well, I'm working as an
economist. So then there was complete
silence for about two minutes. Then one of them said, well,
what makes you think you can do aerodynamics?
I said, well, I have a PhD in Magneto hydrodynamics and I
think it would be relatively easy for me to do aerodynamics.
So they thought about that for a bit.
They finally just said, well, would am I interested in coming
to the factory, which is in Warwick basically exactly what
used to be the Armstrong Whitworth company during the
Second World War made some very bad airplanes.
There was a bomber called the Whitney sort of who knows down.
But anyway, I said, well, it would depend on the salary.
They said they didn't know what the salary would be.
I said, in that case I don't, I don't know whether I'm
interested in coming for an interview and I, I didn't
certainly hear from them again, but but suddenly about a month
later they, they wrote to me and asked me if they would go up
there. So I found you travelled up for
about a couple more interviews and the outcome was that they
decided to offer me a position as chief mathematician of this
Hawkeye City dynamics in Coventry.
So actually not reporting to the head of aerodynamics, but on a
level or even above him. So I thought, well, I got to try
this. So I wound up in Hawkins City
Dynamics. And.
And how old were you then? Well, that was 1964, I guess.
So I was just coming up to SO. You were 3030.
Just approaching that, yeah. Yeah.
So actually incredible. When I got to Orchestilla
Dynamics, the first thing that happened was that the guy who
had kind of initiated hiring me, head of aerodynamics, a guy
called Malcolm James, told me that he decided to leave and was
going to work for Douglas Aircraft in California.
So I had expected that I would collaborate with him, and that
didn't happen. You see it only overlapped a
couple of weeks, but I did, I did quite a lot of antenna
calculations for example. And again, if you go on my
homepage, you can find some Hawker Sidley reports, which
kind of thing there was during at the time.
And well, what I concluded was after I'd been there about a
year was that they were never actually going to build another
missile. They were making anti aircraft
missiles and they had us, it's called the C dot.
And I didn't think we were ever going to build anything.
So I finally decided, well I've either got to get out of the
aircraft industry or I have to come to America, one or the
other because British aircraft industry didn't seem to be going
to build anything anyway. Every project got cancelled by
the government, sometimes even when they got to the point of
flying. So finally I had some interview
actually, I think with the central that's just a generating
board and for some teaching positions somewhere.
I'm so lucky I was turned down by both of them.
But, and then I went on this, I can't quite remember, but at
that time Boeing, Douglas and so on were recruiting quite heavily
in in England. Well, I knew that they had teams
in England and I wasn't interviewed by Helberg or
Douglas. And I probably thought I would
probably rule out because they wouldn't like my trade union
background. But only Drummond, who I didn't
know a great deal about, but they made these sort of fatter
plants during the Second World War.
They said that they were interviewing in London and they
in fact decided to invite me to an interview.
So I wound up hitting it off rather well with the guy who
interviewed me, and he said, well, would I like to be in what
department? I said, well, the research
department at Grumman. He said, well, he didn't
represent the research department, but he could
recommend me to in one of the aerodynamics or thermodynamics,
this kind of thing. So I finally accepted an offer
to work in the aerodynamics department of Grumman or Long
Island. That didn't start very smoothly
the day I got there. Well, firstly they had a kind of
outside the main Grumman sort of campus.
They had this plant where people who hadn't got security
clearances were parked. So I went, I reported to this
department. There was an Englishman in
charge who said he was very sorry, but they didn't have any
free desk for me to sit at. I mean, they had about 150
people in there sitting side by side, but there was no free
desk. So then they said, well, the
best thing to do is we'll send you to to be interviewed by the
head of the aero department. I mean, I had to be escorted by
a copy. So I get to see this head of the
aero department and it was Bill Murphy.
And his opening words were that it was been a mistake to harm
him, that he didn't have any need for anybody with a PhD,
that he had a summoned with a PhD there before who was
arrogant and lazy, had no need for me.
So this didn't seem like a very good start.
But then he handed me off with one of his group leaders, a guy
called Rudy Mayo, who So they had control systems inside the
aerodynamics department, because you have to be like a fighter.
Then the aerodynamic stability depends a lot on things like
dihedral and so on. So it's not just black boxes.
So Rudy Meyer, I met him and he turned out to be an extremely
nice guy who was actually a veteran of the Korean War.
And he said he thought we have seen to look at Horowitz's
method of discerning control systems or stability
augmentation systems that I, I never heard of Horowitz.
So I sort of thought about it a bit.
I counted, I said, look, I think it's very interesting to look at
issue of control systems, but why don't you let me go away and
do a little bit of research for a few days and I'll come back
and make a recommendation. So he he agreed to that.
Now I'm not quite sure how I managed to find the literature,
but I mean, we haven't had quite a good library.
I suppose they may have allowed me into it.
But anyway, when I met Rudy the following week, I suggested that
we try the new optimal control theory.
At that time was quite new. Pioneered by Kalman in
particular with favours from the Kalman filter and really went
along with that. So I started looking at how you
would apply linear optimal control theory to designing
control systems for fighter aircraft and such like or actual
fact. Also, Graumman was building this
electronic warfare plane, the E2 area, the big radome on top of
it. And so that had really awkward
stability characteristics you could have had.
So the question was, could you design something that would make
it flyable? And what I actually got into was
that you don't necessarily optimal control requires you to
measure everything. I mean, it's fairly obvious
because you can't really have an optimal control if you can't
predict the trajectory. So if you express the system of
the 1st order system of differential regulations, you
need to know the initial conditions for each variable.
In other words, if it's a feedback system, you need to
measure everything the full state.
But actually to make a workable control system, you don't
necessarily need that. So you can try to make a what
would be in some sense a suboptimal system nowadays, a
quarterback so-called sparse control, where you restrict the
number of permitted feedbacks. And actually for lateral control
of an airplane, for example, you don't really want to measure the
rail angle because otherwise if you rail 360°, the control
system will try to the whole way back.
It doesn't recognise it. All right, so nowadays, you
know, quite a mathematical theory for sparse control, but I
wound up actually publishing about 15 journal articles and
control theory over the next few years.
Some other strikes of luck at this point because so there was
a a scientist called John Dee Young who was an ex NASA guy who
was developing a theory for predicting very high lift
aerodynamics, what we call V store aircraft.
It was a thing like the Brigade 941 that has his big propellers
and then it has flaps to try to deflect the propeller slipstream
to take off in a very short distance.
So John Deyoung had got a contract from Nasser Ames to
develop this theory, and then he was married to a Brazilian woman
who wasn't very happy, apparently long.
He asked for a leave of absence for three months and then he
didn't come back. So Brahman got out message from
Nasr Ames saying what's happened to the contract?
The Pi appears to be now working for Ling Temco Fort, which the
government didn't know. So now there's a crisis.
The head of aerodynamics said, well, we should just give up on
the contract. And he was overruled by the vice
president of engineering. We said we can't tell NASA that
there's nobody else is able to do it here.
At this point. It turned out that having
someone with a PhD was a little bit of an advantage that they
asked me if I was willing to take over the contract.
I said, well, I don't really want to, but we need to, as long
as I'm also allowed to continue doing some work on this control
system theory. So they agreed to that.
But now when I looked at the youngster, I thought it was
actually not quite right. But I came up with fixes and
kind of convinced the, I said, well, we have to write a
computer, a curve also. And the first reaction was that
that'll cost you much. And I went out to NASA and said,
no, I can write this in within the cost of this contract.
So that meant that at this point I felt that I was being
underpaid by government because I knew that people with my level
of experience were getting quite a bit more by just by reading
the job advertisements that used to come out in the Sunday
newspapers. I wound up having an interview
with an outfit called General Research based in Santa Barbara,
who were trying to develop a anti ballistic missile system.
They offered me a job and my first reaction was to say yes.
So I gave government notice on a Friday and on Monday I was
called in before the VP of engineering who said that he was
retrospectively raising my salary by 30% from the beginning
of the year. Would I reconsider?
So I said yes, but I don't really want to dust your
dynamics. I mean, I want to look at a
broader picture. And finally, they created a
staff position for me where I reported to the manager of
Flight Sciences, a man called Stu Harvey.
Stu first asked me if I could try to design AA wind tunnel
that Common might build. I looked at this for a few
months. I don't really believe that
Common is ever going to go anywhere with it.
Well, then all of a sudden, and this is in I guess like November
1969, Stu Harvey called in and says that we've got to do
something about supercritical wings.
And I said, well, what do you mean by supercritical wing?
And he said, well, the wing that works well in transonic flow.
And Wickham, at this point, Archie Wickham and NASA Langley
had made a big splash with what he called supercritical airfoils
that managed to reduce the shock drag transonic.
And Wickham is experimentalist who just sort of used a file to
change the shapes and so on. And Stu Howie says, well, we
can't depend on Wickham's file. So I said to Stu, well look,
this is actually very interesting.
I said there's a aerospace sciences meeting being held in
New York in January, and maybe I should.
After all, Grumman's 40 miles from New York City.
And I said maybe I should go to this and try to find out what's
being done in transonics. And I went to this meeting and
the whole moment presented what became quite a famous paper on
calculating a solution to the transonic small disturbance
equation. And The thing is I knew very
well that transonic flow cannot be treated by linearising
anything. So you have linearised subsonic
equations called Prandtl Kraut equation or you have linearised
supersonic flow. But those what happens in
transonic flow is it it's actually an elliptic equation in
the subsonic part of the Fairfield and hyperbolic and
supersonic pattern. You can indicate that change in
type and cheap hold on inner equations.
And there were books, for example by Otsochich and Ben
Bersen, attempts at analytic solutions of transonic flow
basically gone no way. So I knew that you had to do
this by some kind of numerical calculation, and I also saw that
computers are getting just fast enough that you actually
probably could do some useful calculations.
So that was kind of my chance to try to solve the problem.
This was a pivotal moment. Just at the right time, down in
the right it. Seems like you had, but you had
a build up. I, I, I assumed that from an
early stage of your career that you were working on transonic
flow, but you almost had 36 years of build up to this point
to then be given the opportunity to, to focus on this.
Yeah, well, that's is it. No, I hadn't actually worked in
Sonic at all, and I knew very little about it, and I didn't
nothing much about numerical methods.
I'd never taken a course in numerical methods, but I had
learned how to solve partial differential equations as part
of my thesis, because when I did this semi magical hydrodynamics,
I had to solve this. I solved the equations for these
alphane waves by separation of variables and expansions and
Bessel functions and things like that.
So I had some background in Pdes.
I've never taken a course in Pdes either.
But now that I realised that you could do something numerically,
turned out that nobody, the head of the aero department, grandma,
wasn't willing to put anybody on to this.
I finally decided I'd better try to do it myself, so I started
trying to write computer programmes for fluid flow and I
didn't. I knew I had to learn more about
numerical methods. So I managed to get hold of a
book by Rick Meyer and Morton called Find out Different
Methods for initial value Problems and that was very hard
for me. Talked things like Banach spaces
and so on. I never heard of, but I fought
my way through this book. And then what we needed to do
was not to solve the small disturbance equation because
they're not small disturbances. When you have a supercritical
airfoil will win. So the best model was to use the
what's called the full transonic potential flare equation.
I ruled out trying to solve the Euler equations because you
didn't have enough memory on the computer at the time.
Do a 3D, see the potential flow solution.
You just got to store 1 variable instead of like 5 variables if
you're solving the Euler equations.
And so I could see that we could actually write a repair game
that would work. And in the meanwhile also I had
discovered that there was a group at the Quran Institute led
by Paul Garabedian and I went in to meet them.
Paul Garabedian had a student called David Corn who they had
developed a method of calculating so-called shock free
airfoils in transonic flow by transformation to the photograph
plane and then a method of solution so-called complex
characteristics. It is new to Bulgaria, but I got
to know them and I thought that we could solve the full
transformation flow equation, but you would need to use some
kind of conformal mapping so as to map the flow outside the
airfoil to the flow inside a unit disk.
Well, that's I had the background and conformal mapping
way back to the Clark book. So I wrote a book Codes to solve
absolutely incompressible Invisible Flow by conformal
mapping with. My first step was flow one, but
I envisaged a sequence of codes that would become progressively
more complicated, more complicated geometries go to 3D
and so on, and eventually go to solving the Euler equation.
So I in Fortune at the time you were not allowed more than six
characters in a variable name or a programme name.
So I truncated FLOW to Flo to allow for three digits.
And after, about, about sometime during 1971 or after, I managed
to get a flow solver for transonic potential flow
working. And at this point, Paul Garabin,
I had persuaded grandma to hire Corn as a consultant.
So we had some contacts and they'd also been writing an
analysis code. And when they found out that I'd
read mine, that appeared to work as well.
Paul asked me if I would spend 3 months at the Quran Institute as
a visitor and I thought I said yes.
I got, I, I realised that I'm not going to be able to do this
in the long run at Grameen. So I had to be considered moving
into academia somehow. And so I went there for three
months and then Paul kind of tested me in various ways during
that time. And then he said, well, why
don't you stay here? And he said, well, I can't just
disappear from grammar and I have to go back and give them
notice. But I agreed and he had me as a
senior research scientist. That's in 1972.
And he told me that there's no faculty positions going to be
available at the Quran Institute, but if you make us
flat, you might get an offer from somewhere else.
So I said, OK, I'll settle for that.
So when I got to the Quran Institute started working for
Paul who he agreed that I would try to write a 3D solver for the
transonic potential flow, but he wanted it to be for a yard
flying wing because he had a contract with Archie Jones at
Nassau Ames. Archie Jones is advocating that
supersonic transport aircraft to adjust a flying wing which would
fly at a skew angle, so-called yard flying wing.
Of course, that never actually happened, but but the meanwhile
also had a contract with NASA Langley because Whitcomb also
understood that if you could calculate transonic flows, it
might help him to obtain better supercritical airfoils.
So I wound up being the point of contact of both Archie Jones and
Nasser Ames and Archie Whitcomb and Langley.
And both of them sort of encouraged me.
They, they said move, Jameson move.
But that's so that maybe I could take this further.
So then another thing that happened was that I'd only been
at the Quran Institute a week when they they had a they
didn't, they didn't take teaching very seriously there.
But what they did do is they teach a lot of courses in the
evenings because they were accommodating people who were
working in the city who wanted to study nights.
Turned out that the graduate numerical analysis course was
normally taught by Isaacson, who's a co-author of the book
Isaacson and Keller, which is quite famous.
And Isaacson was on leave and they hadn't got an instructor.
So they asked me if I would like to try to teach it.
So I said yes, I can try. That was that in some sense is a
circle that for me, because I didn't know really numerical
methods other than the book I mentioned I'd read by Morton
Rickman, but I had to teach some Isaacs and in Keller it really
mean I had to read the book ahead of the class.
But the standby time I've done that, I mean, they're pretty
thorough knowledge of numerical methods.
So then after two years, the maths department at UCLA was
interested. I got an approach and well, they
turned out that they were really bored in trying to hire Paul
Garabinia, but it was the kind of suggestion that they would
hire both of us and they offered me full professorship at UCLA,
but never in writing. But that's what was on the table
at this point. Quran Institute decided to
respond by eventually the first offering me an associate
professor. I said no, I'll take the full
professor at UCLA. So then they did offer me a full
professor said turn it kind of just like that.
So I've never been in a an assistant professor or an
associate professor went straight from the yes.
Straight to the top. So after that I was no longer
working directly for Paul Garrabedian, but of course he
remained in close contact and I went on to he'd.
Actually another thing that happened was just before I got
that offer, I had written this Flow 17 which did a
three-dimensional flow plasters yard wing.
But I knew perfectly well that Craft engine was never going to
build a yard ring that they needed was a swept ring code.
So Paul had another visitor from McDonald, Ludlow said we have a
guy called John Darlene, John Raj who said we need a swept
ring coated and our cell code. I said yes, I know that.
I said, look, I can write the codes for you if you'll help me
debug them. So I wrote the two codes.
Flow 21 was for Nacelle and Flow 22 was for Swept Wing.
In a few weeks, actually. Each was a box of cards.
You know, we were still using card readers.
We had this control letter 6600, which was kind of the world's
fastest computer at the time. That's because Quran had all
these contacts with people like Von Norman and it had the
so-called computer centre in Quran Institute who would get
the latest computers. But the 6600 was fast but stands
to the day. But it only had 130,000 words in
memory. That turns out to be 64 bit
words, turns out to be about 2 megabytes.
So you couldn't really do a 3D calculation and store it on the
core memory. You had to go plane by plane
reading off the disk. Anyway, I So I wrote the two
codes and then John and myself went to see Borgara Billion and
he was furiously angry. He said I was supposed to be
helping him write his book on simply good wing sections and I
was only interested in being famous and so on.
And I said, well yes, I'd certainly like to be famous, but
actually I really need a threat to encourage me.
But John Darlene was not. After that, John Darlene felt he
couldn't whisk confronting Paul and trying to debug his codes or
help me. And so he I decided perhaps
you'd better leave it alone for the moment.
So the two boxes of cards remained on the floor of my
office at the Grown Institute for the next few months.
I never tried to run either of them.
And then when John went back to Douglas, he told them that these
two codes existed but hadn't been debugged.
And then I got a call from a guy, David Curie, who was
working for the McDonnell Douglas Research Centre in Saint
Louis, saying that they had somebody coming for the summer
and would it be possible for them to have this guy see if he
can debug Flow 21. So I said that's fine.
And I flew out to Saint Louis through the box of cards, flew
to one and gave it to Lewin. Well, this guy did nothing that
summer. But then in fall of 74, David
Coe was suddenly offered a position as a visiting assistant
professor at Cornell. They'd had a crisis because two
of their top people had both left, actually a sea bass in
particular. So David asked me if he could
take Flow 21, and I said sure. So a few weeks later he called
up to say that he'd fixed Flow 21.
It was working. And I said, well, you're
interested in Flow 22. And he said yes.
And I said, well, thing about Flow 22 is it's got all these
analytic transformations and the huge, very, very complicated
formulas. We need to have some independent
checking of this. I said, so are you willing to
try to work out all the formulas separately from me?
He agreed to do that. And then we had a meeting and
came to New York and 1st his formulas looked different from
mine, but then we found they were equivalent.
So I gave him Flo 22 and took it back with him to Cornell.
Called up a week later to say, well, he'd fixed that too, and
turned out that I had got a miscount on reading plane by
plane off the disk and writing updates back onto the disk.
But he fixed that and the code worked.
So Flow 22 was really the first computer programme that could
calculate transonic flow solutions for wings with
reasonable accuracy. Those days it took about several
hours to run a calculation on a Contravenator 6600, but Douglas
says attributed a cost of about $3000 for each run.
But they started running it about five times a day when they
were using it to trying to design the C-17 wing and things
like that. And then Canada was trying to
develop what became the Canada, what do you call it?
Well, now it's bombarded, but the regional jet and they wanted
to use Flow 22, but they found a consulting company in Los
Angeles who was running Flow 22 for them.
And this Canada regional jet was the first commercial aircraft
that had a supercritical wing. They see the design of using
Flow 22 and eventually NASA kind of released listing of the code
on some NASA website and it wound up being picked up by the
Russians and the Chinese and everybody.
So the other thing that kind of unusual about my girls, right?
I was a professor now normally of computer science, the Quran
Institute, but I didn't have any students, you know, the people,
the students all wanted to work with the famous professors like
Peter Lacks or Huey Nehrenberg or Jack Schwartz.
You know, we had ten members of the National Academy of Sciences
at the Croyde Institute. So I had no students.
So the only way to continue is to go on writing the programmes
myself. And I had this collaboration
that developed with David Coe and then we managed to get
support from the Office of Naval Research to go pursue this
further. So I realised that we couldn't
really use analytical transformations to do anything
more complicated than a winged fuse large.
So we, David and I developed what we call the finite volume
method for transonic potential for it was really a finite
element method with try linear isoparametric elements, but I
didn't know that at the time. And then I got into the going to
the Euler equations kind of again by sort of circuitous
rooted. I went to various international
meetings those days, something called Symposium Transonicum 2
that was held in Gerdingham at that time.
There was a Wolfgang Schmidt who was a rather charismatic
character who had a small group doing CFD and Dornier, well,
Dornier was a sort of nothing much of a company that somehow
survived after the Second World War, still learned by the
Dornier family, but Afghan. We are very effective in getting
support from various German government agencies.
I met him in Girdingham. In fact, he persuaded me to try
to swim in the town's swimming pool, which is very embarrassing
to me when it turned out that I had to rent some kind of bikini
like swimsuit and I was required to wear the cap on my head.
And the other cap available was a sort of pink cap with feathers
or something. Well, Gang turned out to be a A
star Mortimer player and an expert swimmer and he was.
He kind of forced me into the pool.
But anyway, a couple of years later he persuaded me to come
and spend several weeks at Dawnia.
This is 1979. And then in while 1979 there was
a workshop in Stockholm which tried to compare if it's to
solve the Euler equations with potential flow solutions.
I participated in that. I saw that nobody had a solver
for the Euler equations that reached a steady state, and I
felt that it was wrong. You should be able to get a
steady state. So in 1980, Wolfgang asked you
to come back and he had a onola solvent that had been developed
jointly with ART, received at Dornea, and he wasn't working
all that well. It was one of the ones that
wouldn't get a steady state that had been in his Stockholm
workshop. He asked me if I'd like to look
at it and I said sure. But I said, look, did she really
want me to do this? We're going to have to spend
several hours a day trying to do computer runs and really to pay
for this. He said don't worry.
So Donia had this IBM 4341 and they were charging like one
Deutsche mark per seat to be used second or something like
that. And Donna was kind of on you.
You sat, They had two men in an office.
They would sit facing each other inside each you would sit one.
Each had a desk, but the desks were pushed against each other
and you were looking at each other.
And they all call themselves her, like him and her Fritz.
They didn't use first names And I showed up and I told Wolfgang
by his first name and they were all shocked.
But anyway Wolfgang said don't worry about it.
So I actually looked at their solver and decided that they got
some series, we could call them errors.
They had a kind of, it was implemented what was called the
McCormack scheme, but they had an additional artificial
viscosity term. And the way that was
constructed, turned out it was going to take differences of the
cell volumes if the flow was uniform in the far field.
And that's just generating big error term.
And so rewrote the code with the first step to what became the
James of Spit Turkel scheme in the next year.
And at the end of the three weeks, Hofgang got a bill for
250,000 Deutsche Marks for the computer cost of my visit there.
They see that his problem was not mine.
This is the point when I had been approached by both Stanford
and Princeton with Office of Faculty Positions.
And what had actually happened was that in the academic world
they valued applied mathematicians basically and
people like Milton Van Dyken mortal land on at MIT, they did
all these asymptotic expansions and things like that, but they
none of them had ever written a computer programme or had any
interest in that. And I suddenly discovered that
CFD actually worked quite well. But the thing was that there was
nobody, not many people around who knew how to write these
programmes, mostly from NASA, but none of them had any
teaching experience was I had been teaching at the Groan
Institute. So I wound up being offered jobs
by both Stanford and Princeton and I went out to Stanford and
founded. They were offering me 42,000
years salary and you couldn't buy a house there for less than
about $400,000. And at that time the interest
rate for mortgages is around 13%.
So it turned out that the $42,000 would just about pay the
interest on the mortgage house. So I then I got approached by a
direct phone call from the president of Princeton saying,
well, I'd like to come down and play squash with him.
I didn't know he was the New Jersey State squash champion,
but I said OK, and eventually I took the job in Princeton.
As a result, I went down and lost to him at squash.
It didn't matter very much, but but this 1980 was in transition.
So I had got a first cut at this Euler Savo Donia, but I hadn't
got it yet to converge to a steady state.
And when I first got to Princeton, we didn't have a
computer when I convinced that we had to buy a mini computer
when I would have gone for digital equipment, but Princeton
was kind of IBM territory. So we wound up getting an IBM
4341, which is the same machine as it had it.
Don't have my own. That had filled a huge room with
cabinets all over the place, you know, the disk and one cabinet
and so on. It actually had two megabytes of
memory. I had access to that from
roughly November, and I couldn't get this thing to converge to
state. It would go down to some level
of error around himmatri and start oscillating.
I thought it was maybe reflection from the far field
boundary conditions. That's when I consulted Eli
Tokyo about non reflecting boundary conditions.
That actually didn't fix the problem.
Then I tried running it 1st order accurate and it converged
very well. So then I saw that I needed to
have but that was not accurate enough so that I came up with
this idea of you blend force differences and 2nd differences
of artificial viscosity and use the force differences as
background. But in the nearer shock that
causes an oscillation. So you turn them off and drop to
a locally 1st order accurate through the shock.
And this is eventually we became this so-called JST scheme that
got away with a lot. Yeah.
But actually for me something else happened around that time.
So I I presented this JST scheme and by that time I had got a 3D
implementation with Flow 57 at the AI AA meeting in 1981 in the
summer in Palo Alto I think it was and nobody paid much
attention. But then of course the company
started getting my code Flow 57 and they found it worked.
But just about that time, Phil Rowe came out with his famous
paper with his so-called row matrix of basically the
character it's based and it's the work of genius that paper I
so that kind of got the academic land.
I don't deserve it yourself. But when I tried coding the Phil
Roe's scheme, I found that it wasn't really doing any better
than my scheme, but it wasn't really helpful to to push that.
But what I do find out about thorough scheme especially you
had this mean value of matrix, it's called a row matrix and you
found an analytic way of calculating and then.
So it's a stroke of genius and turns out that that enables
analysis of other schemes, not just a row scheme.
If you use this row matrix, you can actually prove things about
the numerical shock structure, shock waves, being in a shock
capturing scheme and so on. So it really opened the way to a
much broader way of looking at sort of theoretical side of
these schemes that well, I don't know where you want to go from
there, but so we're in 1980. So what happened?
Yes, so you would then at that time at Princeton, one question
I had was the code. So you mentioned that people
were using the code. You were, you know that NASA
were using it different companies and we Fast forward to
now and there are these large commercial companies, you know,
and SIS Fluent and Siemens and all these other.
Did you did you think about or, or maybe this is what's coming
next, the commercialization of this or was it very much at that
time this idea of the code was for everybody to use.
It was sort of for the good of the community.
Well, there are several things that I think you need to
realize, you see. We didn't have copyright
protection of computer codes at that time.
Actually, that was only established by Bill Gates around
about early 198283. So there was only no way to
prevent codes being passed around.
But in fact, of course, if you wrote a code that worked and
Flow 57 went up, being used by just about everybody in the
aircraft industry in America, and then it got, well, Dawnia, I
had it because of course I'd been working with Forfgang at
Dawnia. But then I had a consulting
arrangement with Cray Research and I didn't mention this, but
actually when I wrote 3D code Flow 57 that was in Kandra
around February, March of 1981, I could only run a measure of
like 48 by 8 by 8 on this, I bet 4341.
But I had been approached by Cray Research because we're no
trying to sell their first Cray One computers.
They got benchmarked typically by floor 22.
So they decided it might be better to have me on board.
And I was interested too, because I thought that this JST
scheme should run Vector without a problem.
So they gave me access to Cream One when I first tried to run,
but his code that didn't run vector.
And I went out there and discovered that there were one
or two minor changes I still had to make to the code, but it
would run vector. But when I tried to write Flow
57, I had a terminal with Princeton connected to Cray
Research. So after I got it to run on
4341, I was able to submit the same code to Cray through this
terminal, and I could run something like 96 by 16 by 16.
It still wasn't enough memory on the Cray one at the time, but at
least that was enough to kind of meaningful calculation.
But now it meant Cray had the code.
So they were trying to sell Crays in Europe and they sold
one to the British Royal Aircraft Establishment and
another to the Dutch in Alaro. They they threw in Flow 57 as
part of the deal without my knowledge.
So this kind of got to Holland and England and well, I didn't
get it money out of it, but I did get a good deal of
recognition. And so now my sort of attitude
started to change around there because the Air Force is pseudo
contract with a request for proposals to kind of solve more
general configurations in the obvious thing to do, we go with
some kind of multiple extension of Flo 57 and bunches of
companies like Lockheed and Northrop and Sohn all submitted
proposals to the Air Force, which amounted to further
developing Flow 57. And seemed to me that the Air
Force could have asked me whether I wanted to permanently
the code rather than funding locking what they wound up
doing. So I was sort of started to
wonder, well, how are we going to get more control?
But then I also knew that I wanted to do a complete aircraft
calculation. And my first idea was that you
could use a multi block mesh. But then when I looked at how
hard it would be to generate these meshes, I saw that we
didn't have anybody at Princeton who was going to do that.
And I had this time had brought in Tim Baker from England, as
was research scientist working for me, and he had his friend
Nigel Wetherill who was working at the Aircraft Research
Establishment in Bedford. Nigel was interested in spending
six months sort of sabbatical at Princeton.
The ARA were very worried that they had developed a multi block
extension of Flow 57 and they were very worried that Nigel
would bring it with him to Britson.
Right. I said no, I I've concluded that
we have a better chance if we go to an unstructured mesh.
So I told Nigel to forget about the multi block code.
We were going to see work from scratch, the triangulated mesh.
When Nigel arrived I asked him if he could By this time I'd
become aware of this process called Deloni triangulation and
I asked him if he would try decoding it.
And he got it to run in two DA week or two.
So we could do sort of in principle multiolu and airfoils
and things like that. But then I had a meeting with
Tim and Nigel. I said, well, I think we should
try to do a complete aircraft. And the idea was that Tim could
generate meshes around the different components, rather
like an overset mesh. But then we would take the
points from all these meshes, just a cloud of points, and
triangulate them with only triangulation, and that would be
our grade. And meanwhile, I wrote a flow
solver to work on tetrahedral meshes, and we had an agreement
from Cramer Search that they would support this project.
But then we finally got a first version of the code together.
We called it the airplane code. Turned out that it used the
whole memory of the Quay. So they put it to the back of
the queue. And then at the end of the day
they would turn the shut the machine down and start running
experiments with operating systems.
So it just didn't run. So at that point I tried to
contact Millwagon who was the president of the CEO of Craig
had agreed to support this and he was out of time, but I got
his number 2. They agreed to let us come out
and use the machine during weekends, overnight.
And I also, I had a, because I was a consultant, I had some
kind of immediate monitor Cray and he was very angry that I'd
bypassed him and he dismissed me as a consultant to Cray.
I said, well, we still have accidental machine.
It turned out it is, I didn't care about that.
But we went out in actually in July, we were given the machine
nights during the weekend. So we spent sort of two nights,
we were up all night. Two nights in a row came clear
that Nigel's Delaunay triangulator wasn't working, and
we couldn't really disentangle exactly why not.
But then Nigel was due to go back to England and so we
decided to basically to put everything on hold for a bit.
Tim and I had summer vacations when I was spending time no near
again, but when we got back in fall, we concluded that we
couldn't debug Natural's triangulation because he was
doing some things that are not well.
He kind of assumed that when you called a subroutine that some
data values would still be there when you recall the subroutine.
It's not actually the case in Fortune.
It depends on somebody's compiler whether it is or, which
isn't still there. It was just almost impossible to
figure out exactly what had gone wrong.
So Tim started overwriting a Delaunay triangulator.
And finally in November we used to go out to Cray because also
we couldn't visualize anything. But Cray had these evidence of
Sutherland terminals where you could actually take a look at
what the mesh. Finally in N1 weekend round
about 9:00 in the morning after you've been up all night, we saw
that we've got a mesh that seemed to work.
Then Jim and I had to catch a flight back to Princeton and we
barely caught the flight, but we were upgraded to 1st class,
having showed up late and got free drinks.
That wasn't a really good idea. Then we got to Newark.
I had this junk car that I looked at the airport and Tim
asked you if I could drive, and I said I thought so, but he got
to the car and he just passed out.
I started driving and I discovered that I just had
double vision, which wasn't really good to me.
Two New Jersey Turnpike, basically I could get rid of the
double vision if I took my glasses off.
But then I decided it was kind of lucky that we made it back to
Princeton without a crash. But anyway, we we finally did
get a successful calculation for a Boeing 747 which we presented
in the Aerospace at Sands Meeting Arena in January to 6th
that was well at this point A. Big moment.
Yeah. But I thought now I have to tell
Princeton that we've got the code because Tomb has been paid
full time as a research scientist by of our groundsmith
by Princeton. And normally that meant that any
code we wrote that probably belongs to Princeton.
So I approached my department head at the time and said, well,
I think this code is actually has potential commercial value
and it's also possible that you could patent the numerical
scheme. Well, it turns out that
Princeton had signed some deal with an outfit, some of the
small companies, to at first write a refusal for them.
Property rights are really software developed in Princeton.
And I got a call from somebody. I thought I was talking to a
somebody from the legal department inside Princeton, and
I was talking to these people and I told them those things
that I probably would not have told them.
I don't know who they were. OK Anyway, these people said a
form to Tim and me which we agreed to give them all rights
and perpetuities to the code and needed derivatives for $1.00 and
two, and I refused to sign it. So we're not going to agree with
that. And there really nothing
happened because these people, we said, look, we've written the
code, but you ought to patent it.
So that's, and they didn't. But the meanwhile the code was
kind of in limbo for three years.
And then the Wrights reverted Princeton.
And at this point, Tim and I went back to Princeton and said,
well, look, the only people who can really commercialised the
code or actually asked because we can, we can make it work.
So if I had agreed to let us form a company that we called
ESOP, Aerodynamic Simulation and Optimization, we would pay 15%
of the proceeds to Princeton. So then we tried to market the
airplane code, but the thing was during those three years, that's
when Florence started to get going with the mesh code.
So really we lost the window and I, I didn't really want to run a
company where you, I mean, actually commercial software has
a great deal of an issue of marketing, isn't it?
And such like I really care about doing calculations on some
of the schooling fan or something.
So, but we did, we did make, we did sell about 5 copies of this
code 1 to Douglas where they were used it very seriously.
And John Vassman became very involved in actually he managed
to fix some issues with the code because it, it was by that time
we had versions of Cray with four processes and things like
that. And for some reason this
Delaunay triangulation should have been sequential when it was
running faster with the multiprocesses.
And John figured out that what was happening was that there was
one particular process going on which was consuming all the
time. It was.
So what this Delaunay triangulation, what you do is
you have a triangulation, you insert one more point and then
you re triangulate in the vicinity of that point you add.
But Jim had some flags and at the end of each additional point
he was setting his flags back to 0 through the whole mash and
instead of just in the region where it had been re
triangulated. It turned out that that was 90%
of the time the triangulation was spent resetting these flags
to 0. And when you removed that, the
code ran in like 40 minutes instead of 30 hours
triangulated. But John Rasberg was kind of
responsible when it's coming. So they he was secured
successfully. Donald Louglas to to fix the
some of the problems that the MD 11 on the nacelle wing pylon
interaction, things like that. But at this time, I also came
back to my original first love. You see, I never thought it's
just a matter of calculating the flow.
I thought we're trying to find the best design on actually
going all the way back to 1970. I wrote a quote called SYN one
same time as flow 1 and SIN one actually solved the inverse
problem. We input the crusher
distribution and it finds the shape, but we've conform a
mapping. But I'd never given up on this
thought. But this is where I I went to a
meeting in NASA Langley on flow control probably in maybe
February 1988, something like around that time, kind of a sort
of light bulb went up in my head.
I suddenly realised, oh look, these people are trying to do
flow control, but actually you could use the control theory to
do shape vision. In other words, the control
would be changing the shape of the boundary.
And I should have known this because I had all the background
and control theory. But I think, see when I did
control theory, I always did it for finite dimensional systems.
This would be, I've said something by mistake.
I'm not quite sure what's going on here.
Can you see the pictures still? I've got a second little picture
of myself. I don't know why that happened.
Oh. I can, yeah.
I'm not sure. I can still see you and hear
you. You can see me.
Yeah, all good. Well, anyway, I sort of hit me
that we need you could just use control theory and well, that's
control of infinite dimensional systems PDS.
So I knew that Jacques Louis Leons, this famous French
mathematician who written a bunch of books on controller
pedes. So I had to go off and try to
fight my way through some of this book.
Well, it's very, very difficult. It's all in civil of space, so
on. But I got to enough just to
understand that you need to solve these adjoint equations.
And so I came up with this aerodynamic design by a control
theory of paper that I wrote, and later that.
Yeah. And they did something that I'd
never done before. Aerodynamic design by control
theory doesn't actually have any computer programme in it at all.
It just develops a theory of saying if you did this, it
should work. All right.
And. I think I was partly reacting
to, I'd had feedback that people said I was a good computer
programmer. And I said, well, OK, I'm going
to show you that there's a theory here.
I'm going to publish the theory first.
And I gave it to Steve Orszag, who was a Princeton at the time,
and we were pretty good friends. And he was just trying to start
this new journal of scientific computing.
Because I knew that I felt it would help him starting the
journal, and I knew that he would publish it without my
having to fight by way of arguing with reviewers and so
on. So that came out, and now nobody
seemed to believe me. I read presentations in various
places like NASA Langley who got blank stares, who gave a seminar
at Stanford and just got blank stares.
So then I had to sit down and try to program it myself and I
managed to get to work for transonic potential flow
equation. I actually first made a
presentation at the Israel an Oracle conference in I think
1989. And once I'd written a computer
programme to take work then of course started to attract
attention and I so that was became my main focus after about
1989 nineteen 95 or thereabouts. I eventually.
I I guess that is no, no carry on, sorry.
Well, I think the basic thing is, you know, I was basically
trying to solve the problem of a transonic flow.
I wasn't really basically trying to develop numerical methods as
such for the real sake. If you look at a number of the
other people who've been big contributors in CFG, Philro,
Bran Vanneo and Martin or Stanos and so on, and none of them were
interested in aircraft actually they were interested in CFD as
such, whereas to me. Yes.
I was interested in designing better aircraft, and in
particular the problem of transonic flow was kind of
perfect for me because it was a combination of mathematical
challenge and everything else. And how much do you think that
your time in industry shaped that?
You know, you went from Cambridge then for more than 10
years in industry before you eventually moved to a pure or
more of a pure academic role in the in the 70s.
Do you think that industrial time made you more focus on the
practical challenges rather than a purely theoretical, you know,
research path? Well, I think yes, to some
extent. I mean, I was involved in, I
mean actually I didn't have much involvement in any particular
designer Grumman, but I was, you know, I was exposed to what was
going on. Of course, they were the main
project half drivers. There was this, the F-14 swing
wings fighting, which I didn't believe was the best solution
myself, but, but I used to walk around.
They'd still had draftsman and drawing boards.
I used to walk around sometimes where they had the draftsman and
chat with people. You know, it was a plan for some
kind of government, I think some kind of regional jet, and the
starting point was to trace the three of you drawings from the
Canada regional jet or something like that.
Watch this stuff and doing it. You.
Know, but I, yeah, I wanted to have a real Roman designing an
aircraft and odd enough it finally did happen in a very
direct way when we got to the Gulfstream G650 which was
designed around about 2006 so maybe I should mention that to
you so. Yes, please.
Dating back to, yes, when I was Douglas was using Flay 22, he
was Presheni was one of the really outstanding engineer who
kind of climbed the ladder at Douglas eventually was the
programme manager for MD-95 and things like that.
And I can't remember the MD 90 I think it was.
But then he became vice president of engineering at
Gulfstream and he was particularly interested.
Well, he developed the G5, but then early 2000s he was really
interested in developing a, a supersonic business jet.
He had, they had deals with the Russians, people like Sequoia
and so on. But so he actually asked me if I
would consult for Gulfstream and I said, yeah, but actually I
believe I can help you more with Transonics and his supersonic
business Jetman. And then around about 2006, they
decided to launch this G650, and Press wanted to have a plane
that could fly 7000 nautical miles at mark .85, but he also
wanted to fly 5000 miles at mark .9.
And they're having a problem because they're actually getting
about 3500 miles at mark .9 according to their first efforts
at designing it. The press sent me an e-mail
saying, well, would I like to try to to help that or I said
yes. So I started working with Bob
Mills, who was the aero lead for the G650 Australian tremendous
guy. And this interesting because it
really was an example of remote cooperation.
So I had this wing body shape optimization code SIM 107 and I
could run. I had a cluster in my garage in
this house actually. So I could run these
optimization calculations in a few hours.
And then I gave him an account on my cluster and he could pick
up the geometries from I drop with SIM 107 and he would then
put that geometry into a solver for the complete aircraft.
And they were using USM 3D so that, but I could actually come
up with optimised shapes faster than they could do the analysis
of Gulfstream. But eventually it took hundreds
of iterations because the question of course, exactly what
to optimise and what we were trying to.
Firstly, it was clear that the original green design was going
nowhere. So I told, I told him that
that's why don't I just put in my own wing sections.
I had sort of lots of wing sections that had developed in
different sort of studies over there and just start over.
And so he agreed to that. Then we found that we could get
a wing which basically didn't have drag rise to about mark .88
and could fly mark .9 if you came down to a lower lift
coefficient without a real drag rise or not much.
And essentially the wing was designed kind of semi
automatically by SIM 107. It's so there's a picture of the
two of us in I went to the first high speed wind tunnel test of
this plane. Yes, Sir, Lang is transonic
facility and the quadrenic tunnel.
There's a picture on my homepage that shows the two of us inside
the wind tunnel with the bottle wheel and plane.
And yes, when we actually did. That's amazing.
The actual high speed run, this quadrenic tunnel verified that
our predictions are corrected and it was a completely new
level of performance when we were long range business jet at
the time. So we left something on the
table because I wanted to have a highly slightly more sweep back
in the wing impression. He vetoed that because it was
the first plane the Gulfstream design was going to go fly by
well and he wasn't sure that they could handle the lateral
stability problems. If you had more feedback, and I
wouldn't have the same feedback as you see on a Cessna Citation
10. And I think we could have taken
it just a little bit further. That's the one time that I.
That's amazing. That was.
Designing a plane, basically, yeah, yeah.
But during that time, do you think back, you know, when you
were writing the code, you know, 2 megabytes of memory, you could
barely fit something on to then still within your career,
designing a whole aircraft and designing 10 in your garage.
Do you appreciate, does it still amaze you, the development of
code and computers over your lifetime?
Yeah, well, I think the thing was I always thought that you
had to look at what's feasible at any given time, given
computer resources. In fact, I'm going to tell you
one thing I learned in the British Army doing opposite
training. So they told us that in kind of
situation you have to make a plan, right?
So you said the first thing to do is to make an appreciation of
the situation. You know, the enemy has 10,000
troops and you have 100. So a frontal assault, for
example, is not going to work whatever, right?
And then you have to, to find a goal, let's say defeat the
enemy. But then you do a based on the
appreciation, you might have to refine the girl for something
that could conceivably succeed. So you iterate that a few times
and when you arrive at a girl that's potentially feasible,
then you draw up a plan and you carry it out.
So I would say that I kind of applied that kind of thinking.
It was feasible to do 2D airfoils in 197071 and then by
the time we got to the 1980s, you could do even 3D Euler
equations. And of course eventually, but I
had. So it took about 15 years to get
from 2D airfoil to 3D boiler solution for whole aircraft, but
very much paced. We still didn't have enough
memory in 198586 for the full airplane.
By the time we got to 1990, that was kind of beginning to be
fixed. But I mean, I could hardly
imagine the Rachel Fergus, I mean, this machine that I'm
talking to on it's about I think 32 gigabytes of core memory, TB
solid-state disk. And it also actually like 100
times faster than the Cray 1 was.
So we're living in a totally different world.
And now you move on to where do we go next?
Well, we still then have the solution to the turbulence.
We have this large area simulation, for example, and
that still seems to be a late deal open, still open about how
to set about. I mean, nowadays you have these
buzzwords like scale, resolving simulations and so on.
But I don't think anybody can calculate a flow.
Let's say it was submarine at rental, some intent on the 9th
in an accurate way. At the present time when I got
involved partly under due to pressure from funding agencies
and trying to work on high order methods in the last 15 years, I
think they can contribute. But I know that you're very
interested in machine learning approaches.
I did get to make one stab at looking at machine learning.
Some work we did just about last year.
I had to Stanford before I wound up taking this job at Texas A&M
of the Stanford kind of force me to return.
But we actually did write a paper with Jeremy Morton and
Freddie Witherman, who was then my postdoctor, Michael
Cochendorfer, who was the faculty at Stanford on machine
learning for trying to control vortex shedding officer under
the low Reynolds numbers. And we were using this.
I know of a so-called Koopman operator and I don't know
whether you're familiar with that or not.
But what Koopman did was to say well if you have a a non nano
process, let's say X superscript n + 1 equals some function of X
or north that's non needed. Then if you look at all possible
functions of that solution, so-called G of X, it turns out
that that's if you think of the update to the solution G when
you do this non needed operation.
But that's linear in the sense that if you have a one function
G1 and another one G2, a linear combination still works.
So what you do is you associate an infinitely dimensional linear
operator with a finite dimensional non linear operator.
And then infinitely dimensional operators might have continuous
spectrum. But it could be that there might
be an invariant subset where anything in that subset in the
initial closure subset stays in the subset.
Sure is non linear updates. And if you can detect a
invariant subspace, it might have discrete eigenvalues and
eigenfunctions and that can be used as a model.
And we think that vortex shedding is an example of
something where that might happen.
We did manage to come up with a control system based on that
that kind of worked and got into this nips neuro.
Oh yeah. It has quite a few citations
already, but when I got to Texas A and MI couldn't find anybody
on the machine learning side to work with.
And it's sort of by the wayside it.
Well, I, I do think that somebody, maybe you will succeed
in developing some kind of giant neural network that will
probably predict turbulent flows reasonably well within a few
years. Maybe not.
While I'm around the trouble, assuming we'd have some giant
neural network like these large language models of it could
predict a turbulent separated flow, then the trouble is you
might not get any understanding out of it.
I mean, you can run the neural network and it gives you some
numbers. It doesn't really give you an
understanding of what's going on necessarily.
So that's my. Yes, that is the.
I don't know if you've come across this, but at least what I
was told and for, yeah, as you know, one of the dreams for a
lot of these aerospace companies is digital certification, being
able to actually get a, you know, the approval to certify.
But you have to understand how the code and the method has got
to the answer. And I guess the risk with the
machine learning is it may be able to get the answer, but if
you don't understand exactly how it did it.
Then it's probably not going to be suitable for a certification.
So that still is maybe a challenge.
I think that's true. But of course there are.
I mean, there are people like this, Stephen Branton at Nathan
Goods at University of Washington, who've made a lot of
mind about detecting PDS based on just looking at data such
like, but I don't really, well, I don't know, I'm not too
worried because I think I don't really feel that I'm going to be
replaced by some kind of neural network while I'm alive.
Problem with the next generation to grapple with it.
So what would be your, what would be maybe your advice?
So if, if somebody now is listening or watching to this in
their 20s or their 30s or, or really at any age and we're
going to, you know, wanted to make an impact in the field of
aeronautics or CFD. Is there any things that you've
learnt along the way in terms of your mentality, the way you
approach things? You, you talked about the
British Army example, but is there any sort of yeah, advice
you would give to people? Well, I think really one of the
problems is that there are an awful lot of people doing
doctoral studies in CFD at the moment and very hard to stand
out from the crowd. And I think what I would say is,
in principle, if the crowd is going one way, you need to go in
a different direction. But of course, you've got to
find a different direction that actually works, right.
Because if you go the same direction as everybody else,
you're going to do the same thing as everybody else, and
nobody's going to care all that much.
So the trick is to find a different direction, which, if
you get it to work, will change the direction of the field.
But that's not easy. Maybe.
Yeah. Well, as matter of luck also
getting into that just I think in my case I arrived at
shantonic fluid at the moment when there was a real
opportunity to do something and have an impact and kind of hard.
Now. I mean I can tell you that as a
practical problem, we have all these electric vitae things like
the joby and they have to do a transition from hovering to
forward flight typically by tilting their oceans over.
And we're way short of being able to calculate that by any
numerical method at the present time.
And seems to me so if that's somebody could really solve that
problem, we would have a pretty big impact.
So tackle the hard problems, I guess you're saying look for the
disruptive ideas, the difficult problems, and if you can solve
it, you will have an impact. Rather than taking the easy
incremental work, go for the, go for the more challenging things
that yeah. It would also worthwhile,
actually, we're willing to say. All right.
Well, firstly, of course, you know, the whole issue of funding
is, I mean a lot of universities specifically require people to
to bring in money. Texas, their name, they don't
even have have prizes for people who bring in more than $1
million of the stuff or the other.
But The thing is, if you solve a research problem, then that
basically determines the funding.
If you were to solve it, why should they continue to fund it?
All right. Yeah.
So a lot of people have a sort of strategy that they never
solve a problem. They're always light at the end
of the tunnel where you might begin to solve it and another
couple of beers, you keep on funding it.
What's amazing is you should go ahead and solve it and move on
to something else. But then yeah, the trick there
is all the work I've done that had maximum impact was never
actually directly funded. At the time I did it, we didn't
have a grant relevant tetrahedral mesh solvent for the
Euler equations that we wrote that airplane code.
We had grants and Nassilagni and other places.
All right. Well, it wasn't to do that.
And I didn't have any grant to do our dynamic design by control
theory. I got support later on from the
Air Force, but at the time I did it, it was not funded.
So there's something I think I learned at Grumman a little bit.
So my general approach at Grumman was that I always did
whatever they asked me to do, even if I thought it wasn't
necessary or that useful. But I could do it fast enough
that I could still spend half the time, or maybe even more
than half my time doing something that I thought was
actually going to work. But I could both so.
That's a good. I think it's a good tip.
So be be fast so you can do the other stuff as well.
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. So in fact, if you look at sort
of young faculty, I mean, what you should do is, all right,
you, you have a project that's safe when you've got funding.
But now do that with say half the time and spend the other
half trying something that's high risk and way out there.
And if it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything.
If it does work, more than a big impact.
Yeah. No, that's good.
That is very good. That is, that is good advice.
Well, I am, I want to be appreciative of your time.
I I really do Thank you so much. And I think people will be able
to tell that your journey as you said, I think that was a very
interesting point. I would argue that if you had
done what you did shifted by five years, your code may well
have been the fluent, the star CD of the world.
You know, I think the fact that you did a lot of your work, I
guess just before the boom in CFD, but that does not mean that
your codes were not in some ways massively the, the influence
for, for the practically the codes that people use today.
So I think probably everybody who does CFD today, particularly
in the aerospace sector owes a lot of what they do to what you
did. And that, you know, I think
everybody should be and, and I'm sure are very thankful for all
your work. And of course, all the, I didn't
mention it, but you have supervised so many students who
have now gone on to be leading professors and engineers in
their field who I know, who are appreciative of you.
And probably by the time this comes out, you will have reached
your 90th birthday. So I also wanted to say happy
birthday. Maybe you're not now, but by the
time it comes out, it will be. So I hope that when people are
listening to this, they will also say the same thing.
But. Thank.
Thank you. One other thing I'm going to
mention, you know, I, I didn't finally write a book and I'm not
completely satisfied with the book because it's got an awful
lot of errors of typos and things like that in it.
Somehow trying to straighten out later.
I can get the same fonts all over the place, wound up
introducing mistakes as fast as trying to correct them.
But still, the book's fairly comprehensive.
And I, when I look back, Horace Lamb's Agent Dynamics book, it's
still useful. You know, it was actually
written in the 19th century. But if you still some aspects of
aerodynamic theory for at least for potential flair were all LED
out in Lamb's book. So whether I've done will
actually have any be of any interest 100 years from now,
it's not at all clear to me. But it would be nice if I was
sure, yeah. I'm sure it will be and I'll put
a link to your It's computational aerodynamics,
isn't it? I think that's the book from
Cambridge University Prep. Yeah, I just got it.
I'll put a link into the. Regrettable number of kind of
typos and things like that still, but it's, it does try to
lay out, you know, a kind of theoretical analysis of CFD
methods, not just practical how you arrive at schemes.
No, yeah. Building quite heavily on.
And people should those books, yeah.
And those books are great for people to get a whole.
Yeah. As you say, there's some
textbooks that people read that influence what they did.
And I'm sure the same is true for yours.
So yes, I'm. I'm sure people will be looking
at that in 100 years and all the other papers that you've.
You will. Well, thank you again.
Like I said, I really appreciate it.
And yeah, it was a pleasure, a pleasure to speak to you all.
Right. Well, thank you.
I've enjoyed it actually.