Report on the I.U.T.A.M. symposium on concentrated vortex motions in fluids

Abstract

A symposium on the subject ‘Concentrated vortex motions in fluids’ was held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 6 to 11 July 1964. The symposium was organized by the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and participation was restricted to about 150 people invited on the basis of their active interest in the subject. The author was the secretary of the international committee which planned the meeting, and has prepared the following account of the scientific developments of the symposium in order to make them widely available.[dagger] There will be no other publication of the proceedings of the symposium.Editors’ note. This novel method of reporting the proceedings of a symposium to the scientific community at large deserves consideration by the organizers of other meetings. There are obvious objections to the common plan of publishing in one volume the papers presented at a meeting: being an isolated volume it is not certain to be acquired by libraries; the papers are published at a time and under conditions not known in advance to authors; and papers are not usually subjected to the scrutiny of referees before publication. However, some kind of widely available report on an important meeting seems to be desirable, particularly when participation is by invitation only. Dr Küchemann's detailed account of the papers presented and the discussion that followed them should enable readers to see whether there were any developments at the Michigan Symposium of direct interest to them, and any such developments can be followed up with the aid of the very complete list of references at the end of the report.The Editors will be glad to consider other similar reports of conferences concerned with some aspect of fluid mechanics for publication in the Journal. Further details of the work described at the symposium, and of related previous work, are given in the references quoted.