Scientific progress is not usually straightforward. Researchers pursue and abandon lines of inquiry. Results languish. Theories take decades to cohere. But sometimes the accumulation of scientific ...

Perhaps the oldest and most prominent of these equations, formulated by Leonhard Euler more than 250 years ago, describe the flow of an ideal, incompressible fluid: a fluid with no viscosity, or ...

While order often devolves to chaos, sometimes the reverse is true. Turbulent fluid, for example, has a tendency to spontaneously form a tidy pattern: parallel stripes. Though physicists had observed ...

Tests of a proposed friction-factor equation have shown it to be accurate for calculating pressure loss in turbulent flow for a pipeline transporting a non-Newtonian fluid, such as most crude oils and ...

The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or mathematician to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the ...

For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers to predict the ...

For more than 250 years, mathematicians have wondered if the Euler equations might sometimes fail to describe a fluid’s flow. A new computer-assisted proof marks a major breakthrough in that quest.