CRIGHTON

UNITED KINGDOM (see also List of Individuals)

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15.11.1942 Llandudno/UK - 12.4.2000 Cambridge/UK

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David George Crighton, one of the most influential, inspiring and popular figures in fluid mechanics, died of cancer at the age of 58. He was from 1991 the head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics DAMTP at the Cambridge University. He graduated as a mathematician in 1964 from Cambridge University and then joined the Woolwich Polytechnic as a Lecturer, to move in 1967 to the Imperial College as a research assistant.

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Crighton became acquainted with turbulence in the late 1960s. In collaboration with Ffowcs Williams, then the head of the group, research in turbulence generation by underwater noise was initiated. He earned his PhD title in 1969 for a work on the effect of bubbles on underwater turbulence. Later, two specific problems formed the context of Crighton's work, namely quieting the Concorde's excessively noisy takeoff and limiting the underwater sound by which submarines could be detected. He found new techniques of analysis to model novel sound sources and contributed enormously to the subject. By using singular perturbation techniques and matched asymptotic expansions resulted in the understanding of the problem. In 1972, Crighton was appointed professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leeds, where he made a veritable transformation of the department. In 1986, he joined the University of Cambridge and there followed George Batchelor (1920-2000) both as professor and later as the Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Crighton was president of the European Mechanics Society and served as president of the Institute of Mathematics in succession to James Lighthill (1924-1998). Lighthill had pioneered the subject of aeroacoustics, but Crighton was probably more versatile in using the theory. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993.

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_{Crighton, D.G. (1969). Sound generated by turbulent two-phase flow. Journal of Fluid Mechanics 36: 585-603.}

_{Crighton, D.G., Leppington, F.G. (1971). On the scattering of aerodynamic noise. Journal of Fluid Dynamics 46: 577-597.}

_{Crighton, D.G. (1975). Basic principles of aerodynamic noise generation. Aerospace Sciences}

_{16(1): 31-96.}

_{Crighton, D.G. (1992). Modern methods in analytical acoustics. Springer: Berlin. Ffowcs Williams, J.E. (2000). David George Crighton. Physics Today 53(9): 82-83. P}

_{Ffowcs Williams, J.E. (2002). David Crighton: A commentary on his career and his influence on aeroacoustic theory. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 34: 37-49. P}