Hans W. Liepmann

Hans Wolfgang Liepmann ( born July 3, 1914 in Berlin, † June 24, 2009 in La Cañada Flintridge, California ) was a German-born American physicist and engineer who worked on hydrodynamics and aerodynamics.

Life

Liepmann grew up in Berlin as the son of a doctor ( and director of a hospital ) and there he also made high school. In 1934 he went with his family on the run from the Nazis to Istanbul, where his father headed the gynecology department at the university. He attended the University of Istanbul in 1938 and a doctorate at the University of Zurich ( in low temperature physics at Richard Bar ). He heard there also physics lectures by Gregor Wentzel. From 1939 he was a Fellow at Caltech in Aeronautics Theodore von Kármán. In 1945, he was there, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor in 1946 and 1949, professor of aeronautics. In 1976, he was Charles Lee Powell Professor of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics, and from 1984 Professor von Karman. Since 1985 he has been Professor Emeritus. 1972 to 1985 he was director of the Graduate Aeronautics Laboratories ( GALCIT ).

In 1993 he received the National Medal of Technology for outstanding research contributions to hydrodynamics and the 1986 National Medal of Science. In 1980 he received the hydrodynamics prize of the American Physical Society in 1985 and its Otto Laporte Award. He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Aachen and received the German Ludwig Prandtl Ring. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

He dealt with many areas of hydrodynamics such as flow instabilities, turbulence, flow of liquid helium, gas kinetics, viscous incompressible fluids, interaction of shock waves with boundary layer flows, turbulent shear flow, heating of aircraft at supersonic, chemistry turbulent mixtures, magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics. At Caltech, he supervised more than 60 doctoral students. During the Second World War, he worked on high-speed aerodynamics for flights near the sound barrier ( transonic range).

At Caltech, he was responsible for the establishment of a study program Applied Mathematics (1967) and ( with Amnon Yariv and Roy W. Gould ) Applied Physics (1974).

Writings

• With Allen E. Puckett: Introduction to the Aerodynamics of a Compressible Fluid, Wiley 1947
• Anatol Roshko: Elements of Gas Dynamics, Wiley 1957, Dover 2002