H.A. Lorentz: Sketches of his work on slow viscous flow and some other areas in fluid mechanics and the background against which it arose

Abstract

With this special issue of the Journal of Engineering Mathematics we commemorate and celebrate the appearance, one hundred years ago (Fig. 1), of a paper [1] by the Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz in which he put forward some seminal ideas on slow viscous flow (see also [2–4]). Lorentz (to be pronounced as Lawrence with emphasis on the first syllable) is not known, per se, for his contributions to fluid mechanics. Indeed, he was a physicist whose fame rested first and foremost on his contributions to the theory of electromagnetism, electrodynamics, the theory of electrons and the dawn of relativity. His place among his contemporaries was, perhaps, described best by Albert Einstein who wrote ([5] and [6, pp73–76]) in 1953:

“At the turn of the century the theoretical physicists of all nations considered H.A. Lorentz as the leading mind among them, and rightly so.” But then, Einstein continues as follows:

“The physicists of our time are mostly not fully aware of the decisive part which H.A. Lorentz played in shaping the fundamental ideas in theoretical physics. The reason for this strange fact is that Lorentz’s basic ideas have become so much a part of them that they are hardly able to realize quite how daring these ideas have been and to what extent they have simplified the foundations of physics.”