Background
Saffman was born in Leeds, England, and educated at Roundhay Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge which he entered aged 15.
mathematician university professor
Saffman was born in Leeds, England, and educated at Roundhay Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge which he entered aged 15.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, studied for Participant III of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos in 1954 and was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy in 1956 for research supervised by George Batchelor.
Saffman started his academic career as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, then joined King’s College, London as a Reader. Saffman joined the Caltech faculty in 1964 and was named the Theodore von Kármán Professor in 1995. According to Dan Meiron, Saffman “really was one of the leading figures in fluid mechanics,” and he influenced almost every subfield of that discipline.
He made important contributions to the theory of vorticity arising from the motion of ships and aircraft through water and air.
His work on wake turbulence led the airlines to increase the minimum time between takeoffs of airplanes on the same runway. Saffman also studied the flow of spheroidal particles in a fluid, such as bubbles in a carbonated beverage or corpuscles in blood.
His work overturned previous assumptions that inertia was an important factor in these particles" motion and showed instead that Non-Newtonian properties of fluids play a significant role. Along with his many research papers, Saffman wrote a book, Vortex Dynamics, surveying a field to which he had been a principal contributor.
Russel East. Caflisch writes that “This book should be read by everyone interested in vortex dynamics or fluid dynamics in general.”.
Royal Society; American Academy of Arts and Sciences.