The 200th Anniversary of the Navier-Stokes Equations

Earlier today, Nature Physics published a "Measure for Measure" note by Oxford professor Julia Yeomans about the Navier-Stokes Equations and the Reynolds Number.  She reminds us that next year, 2022, will be the 200th anniversary of the first appearance of these equations at the hand of Claude-Louis Navier in 1822.  Investigating further (Rouse & Ince, 1957; Darrigol, 2005; Eckert, 2006), it appears that Navier read his papers at the French Royal Academy of Sciences that year, but the written publication appeared later in 1827.  Navier's original formulation was based on a now-discredited molecular model.  Meanwhile also in 1822, A.L. Cauchy published his theory of stress in continua.  S. D. Poisson, Barre de Saint-Venant, and I. S. Gromeka are others who contributed to the theoretical development of the Navier-Stokes equations.  In most historians' view, the definitive derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations was given by George Gabriel Stokes in 1845.  Nonetheless it was indeed Navier in 1822 who first presented the equations.  Prof. Yeomans also discusses Osborne Reynolds' 1883 paper on the nondimensional parameter named in his honor.  

DTLR is grateful to Nature Physics and Prof. Yeomans for bringing these notions to the attention of the journal's readers.  As I've written before, fluid mechanics has been underrepresented in the U.S. physics curriculum, and it's nice to see pieces like this in physics journals.

References

O. Darrigol, 2005:  Worlds of Flow:  A History of Hydrodynamics from the Bernoullis to Prandtl.  Oxford University Press.

M. Eckert, 2006:  The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics:  A Discipline between Science and Technology.  Wiley-VCH.

H. Rouse and S. Ince, 1957:  History of Hydraulics.  Iowa Institute for Hydraulic Research.

J. M. Yeomans, 2021:  Fluid flows on many scales.  Nature Physics, 17:  756.