Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tuesday September 21, 2004 2:30 PM
Building 2, Room 338
Abstract
The most widely used definitions of a vortex are not objective: they
identify different structures as vortices in frames that rotate relative to
each other. Yet a frame-independent vortex definition is essential for rotating
flows and for flows with interacting vortices. In this talk, I give an objective
description of vortices using dynamical systems methods. I show on examples
how the resulting vortex criterion outperforms earlier frame-dependent criteria.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Mathematics
Cambridge, MA 02139
