Ten Years of Passion: I.S. Gromeka’s Contribution to Science

Abstract

The work and life of Ippolit Stepanovich Gromeka is reviewed. Gromeka authored a classical set of eleven papers on fluid dynamics in just ten years before a tragic illness ended his life. Sadly, he is not well known to the western scientific community because all his publications were written in Russian. He is one of the three authors who independently derived an analytical solution for accelerating laminar pipe flow. He was the first to eliminate the contradiction between the theories of Young and Laplace on capillary phenomena. He initiated the theoretical basis of helical (Beltrami) flow, and he studied the movement of cyclones and anticyclones seventeen years before Zermelo (whose work is considered as pioneering). He is also the first to analyse wave propagation in liquid-filled hoses, thereby including fluid–structure interaction.