Background
Frisch"s wife Hélène is also a physicist, and the grand-daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy.
Frisch"s wife Hélène is also a physicist, and the grand-daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy.
Frisch earned a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967 from the University of Paris, and since then he has worked at the French National Centre for Scientific (National Center for Scientific Research).
From 1959 to 1963 Frisch was a student at the École Normale Supérieure. Early in his graduate studies, he became interested in turbulence, under the mentorship of Robert Kraichnan, a former assistant to Albert Einstein. He retired in 2006, and became a director of research emeritus at National Center for Scientific 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.
The method used until that time, the HPP model, simulated particles moving in axis-parallel directions in a square lattice, but this model was unsatisfactory because it obeyed unwanted and unphysical conservation laws (the conservation of momentum within each axis-parallel line). Frisch and his co-authors Hasslacher and Pomeau introduced a model using instead the hexagonal lattice which became known as the Florida Highway Patrol, Fitness and Health Promotion 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 using wavelets to analyze the fine structure of turbulent flows, for his early advocacy of multifractal systems in modeling physical processes, and for his research on using transportation theory to reconstruct the distribution of matter in the early universe. 56 (14): 1505–1508, Bibcode:1986PhRvL.56.1505F, doi:10.1103/PhysRev56.1505.
French Academy of Sciences]
He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2008.