Fabian Waleffe

THIS PAGE IS ANCIENT (circa 1994, 1995, in the early days of Mosaic ) and TOTALLY OUTDATED !

I am an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT.

My research interests are primarily in Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence as well as Numerical and Asymptotic Methods.

Research Activities

My main research focus lately has been on understanding the Nonlinear Dynamics of Shear flows. This is a project that has occupied me on and off for the past few years and that first consisted of identifying and isolating a fundamental self-sustaining process in shear flows. Understanding the bifurcation of simple shear flows such as plane Couette, plane Poiseuille and pipe flows has been a long-standing problem in Applied Mathematics and Fluid Mechanics, ...but there is light at the end of the tunnel!
I have been involved with numerical simulations applied to Harvey Greenspan's new centrifugal spectrometer. Tony Harkin and I had developed a spectral element code to solve the Navier-Stokes equations in a rotating frame. We limited ourselves to axisymmetric flows, but otherwise completely general geometry. Mats Nigam has now re-written a finite element code for the same class of problems and is extending it to deal with mixtures.

18.358-- Hydrodynamic Instability and Turbulence, David Benney and I will teach this course jointly for the first time in Spring 1997.
18.330-- Introduction to Numerical Methods (syllabus for Spring 1996)
18.303-- Linear Partial Differential Equations
18.336-- Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations (syllabus for Spring 1996)
18.354-- Introduction to Fluid Mechanics
18.086-- Mathematical Methods for Engineers
18.098-- Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics: IAP 1997, taught jointly with Michael Brenner.

(see the Math Classes page for Course descriptions and Schedules.)

Fabian Waleffe
MIT, Room 2-382
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
Ph: (617) 253 4387
Fax: (617) 253 4358
waleffe@math.mit.edu