On May 25, 5:20*pm, Kate Brown wrote:
Did anyone else hear Giles Foden on Radio 4 this morning talking to
Andrew Marr about his new book 'Turbulence'? *A lightly fictionalised
account of weathermen trying to forecast the conditions for D-Day, with
a leading character based on Lewis Somebody who had worked out massively
complex equations which can only now be attempted with parallel
computing.... *Sounded quite interesting to me, but then I don't know
very much about it!

http://www.faber.co.uk/work/turbulence/9780571205226/

The Radio 4 prog is hehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kj2dw

You can Listen Again or catch it later tonight. *The Foden bit is about
halfway through, I think.

--
Kate B

PS 'elvira' is spamtrapped - please reply to 'elviraspam' at cockaigne dot org dot uk if you
want to reply personally

I heard it. The bloke was Lewis Fry Richardson, the first man to try
to model the weather. That was in the 1910s long before computers
were invented. But I think the reason his name rang a bell with me was
because he is the author of this verse:

Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity,

and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity.

There is a Wikipedia entry on him he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson

Sadly his "Weather Prediction by Numerical Process" is not included in
the R Met Soc classic papers at:
http://www.rmets.org/about/history/classics.php

Wikipedia has answered a question that was bugging me:
Why did Mandelbrot write a paper about the length of the British
coastline when he was American?
The answer was that Richardson had already shown that the length is
fractal, long before Mandelbrot had coined that word!

I find it all very interesting.

Cheers, Alastair.