VV(13) - Foppl

[Dave Monroe]

Good work.  One might well venture that anyone with an
engineering background working in the aerospace
industry (like, say ...) would definitely have been
familiar with Prandtl, if only by virtue of his name
being embedded in a couple of different mainstays of
aerodynamics (the Lanchester-Prandtle Wing Theory, the
Prandtl-Glaubert Rule, apparently), not to mention his
"discovery" (in that peculiar physical science way of
"discovering" things that have more or less by
definition always been there ...) of that
aerodynamically (for starters) all-important "boundary
layer."  See also ...

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=62753

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?idxref=59032

http://library.thinkquest.org/25486/english/pioneers/prandtl.shtml

That last site, while having only a minimal bio of
Prandtl, not only seems to rate him very highly (note
his very select company amongs the biographies), not
only has all sorts of other aerodynamic info, but is
in german as well.  Just sub "german" for "english"
...

http://library.thinkquest.org/25486/german/pioneers/prandtl.shtml

Works at least with French as well.  This one is also
at least bilingual in the Germanic language family ...

http://gamm2000.dlr.de/Prandtl-Exhibition/

And, of course, it only takes a modicum of historical
interest to work one's way to August Foppl, no doubt a
potential, possible, probable, likely, whatever,
source for that name, though, as seemingly always with
Pynchon, any and all other possible possibilities
ought to be taken into account as well (again, see
Lhamon's speculations on the name).  I think J. Kerry
Grant goes right for August Foppl as well, though I
don't have his Companion to V. handy.  But I've no
doubt that it was ol' August who planted the idea here
...

One might also note that Foppl was an influence on the
young and impressionable Einstein, not only by virtue
of (apparently, it's been far too long since my own
abortive physics "career" for me to pretend to
rememebr, much less explain, this fine point here)
having "presented Maxwell's equations in an unorthodox
manner" ...

http://128.143.168.25/classes/200R/Projects/Fall_1996/einstein2/ein_home.htm#influences

... but also by virtue of his concern to explicate
physics to "lay" audiences, which, as anybody who's
read Einstein's own "lay" work on Relativity might
have noticed (it's eminently readable, for anyone
interested, though I have a nostaligic fondness for
that installment of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" covering the
subject) Uncle Albert shared ...

http://www.dbbm.fiocruz.br/www-mem/95sup1/31cti.html

I think that Einstein's copy of Foppl's book was
famously annotated as well, AE's marginalia being the
written inception of relativity theory or somesuch
(those musings on a freefalling elevator at the Swiss
Patent Office being another legendary primal scene),
but ... but, you know, even if there isn't any
particularly apparent reason for some of these
elements in those Pynchonian texts, you--or, at least,
I--always manage to learn a little something or
another by activating the ol' "Magic Eye" ...

--- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have no idea if these name-connections have any
> relavence to V.
> 
>
http://mech.postech.ac.kr/fluidmech/history/Prandtl.html
> 
> Introduced concept of the boundary layer and is
> generally considered to be 
> the father of present-day fluid mechanics
> -----------------------------------
> Prandtl was born in Freising, Germany, in 1875. He
> studied mechanical 
> engineering in Munich. For his doctoral thesis he
> worked on a problem on 
> elasticity under August Foppl, who himself did
> pioneering work in bringing 
> together applied and theoretical mechanics. Later
> Prandtl became Foppl's 
> son-in-law, following the good German academic
> tradition in those days.



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