Theodor Meyer
| Theodor Meyer | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
March 1, 1882 Bad Bevensen, Lower Saxony, Germany |
| Died | March 8, 1972 (aged 90) |
| Residence | Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Known for | Gas dynamics |
| Spouse(s) | Frieda Büscher |
| Children | Hannelore Meyer (30 March 1924 – 25 August 1942) |
| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral advisor | Ludwig Prandtl |
Theodor Meyer (July 1, 1882 – March 8, 1972 in Bad Bevensen, Germany) was a mathematician, a student of Ludwig Prandtl, and a founder of the scientific discipline now known as compressible flow or gas dynamics.
As a youth, Meyer studied mathematics and physics. He was privileged to learn from several of the great minds in these fields, including David Hilbert, Carl Runge, Hermann Minkowski, and Ludwig Prandtl. He and Prandtl made a great team, for Prandtl's intuitive and experimental approach to fluid mechanics has become legendary, and Meyer complemented his advisor's strengths with a formidable mathematical talent.
During the first decade of the 20th century, Meyer worked under Prandtl's guidance at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany on the theory of supersonic gas flows, then a brand-new field of study that we now call compressible flow or gas dynamics. In particular, Meyer developed the theory for how gases traveling at supersonic speed slow down abruptly through oblique shock waves, and how they accelerate smoothly through what we now call a Prandtl–Meyer expansion fan. Prandtl first showed images of such flows captured by Schlieren photography, then the underlying theory appeared in Meyer's Ph.D. dissertation, hence the present terminology for the Prandtl–Meyer function and the Prandtl–Meyer expansion fan.
Although the names of Prandtl and Meyer are now universally connected with fans of expansion or compression waves in high-speed gas flows, their leading role in the discovery of oblique-shock waves has been forgotten. Present-day textbooks on compressible flow and gas dynamics simply present the oblique shock theory without attribution. The last textbook to properly acknowledge Prandtl and Meyer for oblique-shock theory was apparently written in 1947. Nonetheless, the Ph.D. dissertation of Theodor Meyer in 1908 is arguably one of the most influential in the entire field of fluid mechanics.
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