With the news of Richardson and Lee winning the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics, it brings home to one what a strong university is Cornell, not simply in our niche of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, but across the board. We have 26 Nobel Laureates who are or have been affiliated with Cornell as faculty or students, several National Medals of Science, and Macarthur Prizes, but also several Pullitzer Prizes for literature ! In fact, the present strengths of Cornell reflects beautifully the original intent of its founder of 1865, namely Ezra Cornell, who stated "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study". We have seven National Research Centres sponsored by the National Science Foundation, including the Cornell Theory Centre National Supercomputer, which our faculty use extensively. In fact, Cornell leads the nation in NSF-sponsored programs in science and engineering. Extensive further details regarding general information for Cornell University can be found at the Web Site: www.cornell.edu

As regards the Cornell engineering education, a prospective student would naturally be concerned about the "marketability" after a PhD or Masters degree. It is well-known that the Cornell research graduate is very highly regarded, in both university and industry, and under no circumstances any less than the other 4-5 top universities in the country. For the serious student, choice of university should not depend on US News popular press ranking, where the rank depends highly upon whether the particular school or department can suitably be "pigeonholed" or categorized. For example (and an important one), fluid mechanics is not evaluated in these rankings, where at Cornell our fluids faculty clearly cut across different categories in the national "rankings". The categories for graduate study are Aerospace (where strength is naturally often weighted away from fluids to such topics as control and structures), and Mechanical Engineering (where clearly the weighting is spread over very many mini-disciplines aside from fluids). Cornell is invariably in the top 6-7 in the US News popular press rankings, and in the more prestigious National Research Council rankings. However, within fluid mechanics, for example turbulence, we are arguably the top university, but it does obviously depend on the specialty even within fluids/aerospace. On the other hand, the other top 4 universities (comparable to Cornell) are arguably the best in their particular specialities. Choice of university, for the enlightened student, must surely depend on:

• Depth of Faculty Quality within fluid mechanics (and within the specialties).


• Individual Faculty Quality (and personal compatability of a specific faculty member) reasonably matched with the student's interests.

Regarding our strength as a department in Fluids, please see the enclosed Table below concerning review papers in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. It must be said that in our particular expertise at Cornell, general turbulence, turbulence modelling, transition, vortex dynamics, vortex-induced vibration, applied mathematics in fluids, etc., we could be perceived as the number one. In other specific research, the country's top university might be out of a group of another 4 institutions. It really depends on WHAT you want to study, even within fluid mechanics.

Our fluids faculty, namely Lumley, Pope, Leibovich, Warhaft, Caughey, Williamson, George, have almost all written invited review papers for their field, textbooks in their field, held editorship of the best journals, and received national Presidential honours or Society recognition, such as membership of the National Academy of Engineering. Other departments have equally well-known international people, for example Guckenheimer and Jenkins (TAM), Cowen (Civil Eng), Koch (Chem Eng), Bodenschatz (Physics), all of whom come to our seminar series on turbulence and transition. You may take lectures from any of these or our personel, with the utmost flexibility, you may focus your courses in your area of choice.

Indicator of Strength in Fluid Mechanics:

Although there is no indicator for specifically fluid mechanics in any of the ranking systems, there are two objective ways in which to compare fluids faculty.

(1) Citations: One of the Indicators is to note the numbers of citations concerning research papers of the various faculty. In our department, 4 of the top 5 most-cited faculty are in fluid mechanics! My own number of citations can be found on the following page.

[Citations for C.H.K. Williamson]

(2) Review Papers: Another Indicator of fluids faculty strength is to note the number of invited papers presented by the fluids faculty to the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. Since an invitation for a review from the Annual Review Committee is given only about every 20 years to a given field of research, and only to the top person in a given field, the number of invited papers in this prestigious review journal is a strong indicator of the strength of a department in fluid mechanics.

For my own part I have been invited to write two such papers in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, namely:

• "Vortex Dynamics in Wakes" Williamson (1996) Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics


• "Vortex-Induced Vibrations" Williamson (2003) Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics

Two of my students have each published or submitted 4 papers to the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (as well as a bevvy of other journals). Such publications can be seen in the Publication List.

[Selected Recent Publication List]

I am also the Chairman (and instigator) of a series of international conferences, two of which we have had (in 1998, Washington; 2000, Marseille, France), and the next one is to be held off the coast of Queensland (the Great Barrier Reef) in 2002.

My feeling is that you only live once!!