Uriel Frisch

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Wikipedia

Uriel Frisch
Born (1940-12-10) December 10, 1940 (age 84)
Agen, France
OccupationMathematical physicist
TitleDirector of Research Emeritus
Board member of
SpouseHélène Frisch
RelativesPaul Lévy
Awards
  • Peccot Prize of the Collège de France (1967)
  • Bazin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences (1987)
  • Lewis Fry Richardson Medal (2003)
  • Modesto Panetti e Carlo Ferrari Prize (2010)
Academic background
Alma materFrench National Centre for Scientific Research
ThesisLa propagation des ondes en milieu aléatoire et les équations stochastiques (Wave propagation in a random medium and stochastic equations) (1966)
Doctoral advisorRobert Kraichnan
Academic work
DisciplinePhysicist
Sub-disciplineFluid dynamics
InstitutionsFrench National Centre for Scientific Research
Notable students
  • Marcel Lesieur (1973)
  • Claude Basdevant (1981)
  • Zhen-Su She (1987)
  • Silvio Gama (1993)
Notable worksTurbulence: The Legacy of A. N. Kolmogorov
Notes
List of notable students from the Mathematics Genealogy Project.[1]

Uriel Frisch (born on December 10, 1940 in Agen, France)[2] is a French mathematical physicist known for his work on fluid dynamics and turbulence.

Biography

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.[3] Frisch earned a Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Paris, and since then he has worked at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He retired in 2006, and became a director of research emeritus at CNRS.[2][4]

Frisch's wife, Hélène, is also a physicist and the grand daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy.[5]

Research

Frisch is the author of a 1995 book on turbulence and of over 200 research publications.[6]

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 Brosl Hasslacher and Yves Pomeau introduced a model using instead the hexagonal lattice which became known as the FHP model after the initials of its inventors and which much more accurately simulated the behavior of actual fluids.[7][8]

Frisch is also known for his work with Giorgio Parisi on the analysis of the fine structure of turbulent flows,[9] for his early advocacy of multifractal systems in modeling physical processes,[10] and for his research on using transportation theory to reconstruct the distribution of matter in the early universe.[11]

Awards and honors

Frisch won the Peccot Prize of the Collège de France for his doctoral thesis in 1967, the Bazin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985, and the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal of the European Geosciences Union "for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of turbulence" in 2003.[2][12]

He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2008.[2] He is an Officier of the Ordre national du Mérite and the recipient of the 2010 Modesto Panetti e Carlo Ferrari prize.[13] In 2020 he has been awarded with the prize EUROMECH, provided by the European Mechanics Society.[14]

Selected publications

  • Frisch, U.; Hasslacher, B.; Pomeau, Y. (1986), "Lattice-gas automata for the Navier-Stokes equation", Phys. Rev. Lett., 56 (14): 1505–1508, Bibcode:1986PhRvL..56.1505F, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.1505, PMID 10032689
  • Frisch, Uriel (1995). Turbulence. The legacy of A. N. Kolmogorov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45103-5. MR 1428905.[15]
  • Frisch, U.; Matarrese, S.; Mohayaee, R; Sobolevski, A. (2002). "A reconstruction of the initial conditions of the universe by optimal mass transportation". Nature. 417 (6886): 260–262. arXiv:astro-ph/0109483. Bibcode:2002Natur.417..260F. doi:10.1038/417260a. PMID 12015595. S2CID 4379455.

References

  1. ↑ "Uriel Frisch". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. North Dakota State University. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Uriel Frisch". www.academie-sciences.fr. Académie des sciences. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  3. ↑ "Renowned Turbulence Expert Uriel Frisch visits PKU:Hold onto Turbulence Tightly Like a "Bulldog"". College of Engineering. Peking University. 2009. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  4. ↑ Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2012-03-05.
  5. ↑ Schwartz, Laurent (2001), A mathematician grappling with his century, Springer, p. 141, ISBN 978-3-7643-6052-8.
  6. ↑ Frisch 1995.
  7. ↑ Frisch, Hasslacher & Pomeau 1986.
  8. ↑ Wilson, Greg (8 October 1988). "The Life and Times of Cellular Automata" (PDF). New Scientist. 120 (1633): 44–47. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  9. ↑ Jaffard, Stéphane; Meyer, Yves; Ryan, Robert D. (2001). Wavelets: Tools for Science and Technology. Boston, MA: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. pp. 241–266. ISBN 978-0-89871-448-7. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  10. ↑ Barndorff-Nielsen, Ole E.; Mikosch, Thomas; Resnick, Sidney I. (30 March 2001). Lévy Processes: Theory and Applications. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-8176-4167-2. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  11. ↑ Frisch, Uriel; Matarrese, Sabino; Mohayaee, Roya; Sobolevski, Andrei (May 2002). "A reconstruction of the initial conditions of the Universe by optimal mass transportation". Nature. 417 (6886): 260–262. arXiv:astro-ph/0109483. doi:10.1038/417260a. ISSN 1476-4687. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  12. ↑ "EGS Awards - Lewis Fry Richardson Medallist - 2002". www.egu.eu. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  13. ↑ "Modesto Panetti e Carlo Ferrari prize". Italian Academy of Sciences.
  14. ↑ "Fluid Mechanics Prizes – Euromech". euromech.org. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  15. ↑ Bradshaw, Peter (8 November 1996), "Of cream and clouds (review of Faber's Fluid Dynamics for Physicists and Frisch's Turbulence)", Times Higher Education

Further reading