Fluid dynamics

Having solved a central mystery about the “twirliness” of tornadoes and other types of vortices, William Irvine has set his sights on turbulence, the white whale of classical physics.

Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.

Rogue waves — enigmatic giants of the sea — were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict them all.

By exploiting randomness, three mathematicians have proved an elegant law that underlies the chaotic motion of turbulent systems.

A startling experimental discovery about how fluids behave started a wave of important mathematical proofs.

Researchers have spent centuries looking for a scenario in which the Euler fluid equations fail. Now a mathematician has finally found one.

Physicists have found examples of “universality” in a system of confined bubbles. The work could help researchers understand the strange behavior of singularities.

Turbulence is everywhere, yet it is one of the most difficult concepts for physicists to understand.

Simple physical principles can be used to describe how rivers grow everywhere from Florida to Mars.