Uriel Frisch

The 2003 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal is awarded to Uriel Frisch for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of turbulence.

Uriel Frisch is a well known scientist worldwide. Since the late 1960’s he has been deeply involved in theoretical and numerical studies of turbulence for both ordinary flow and magnetohydrodynamical flow, and in nonlinear and statistical phenomena studies in geophysical and astrophysical fluid dynamics. He and his students have contributed to the renewal of this subject in France and worldwide.

He has published more than 200 papers, most of them in refereed journals. He published a book on Turbulence (Cambridge University Press) in 1995. He received two prizes: the Peccot Prize from the Collège de France in 1967 for his thesis and the Bazin Prize from the Académie des Sciences in 1985, of which he is a corresponding member, for his work on turbulence. His working areas are mechanics (turbulence, chaos, numerical methods), statistical physics (hazardous propagation, stark enlargement, lattice gazes), and applications to astrophysical and geophysical fluids (dynamo-effect, cosmology, resonant interactions of flows).