Keith Moffatt - The beauty of mathematics applied to human biology

Keith Moffat, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, talks about fluid mechanics.

About Keith Moffat

"I’m Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

My research field is fluid mechanics in all its aspects, ranging from the micro scale, applicable to biological fluid mechanics in particular, to the macro scale interaction with magnetic fields, with relevance to planets, stars and galaxies."

Key Points

• Fluid mechanics has a very important part to play in biology. It’s something that we need to understand in our attempts to combat disease. • In the 1860s, Kelvin realised that if vortex lines in a fluid are knotted, they remain knotted for all time. In 2014, knotted vortices were realised for the first time in a laboratory. • Under the Navier–Stokes equations, these knotted structures can unknot. That leads to exciting work involving reconnection of vortex lines and associated jumps in vortex topology.

Fluid mechanics has a very important part to play in biology. There’s a whole area described as biological fluid mechanics and physiological fluid mechanics, which is concerned with airflow in the lungs or flow of blood through the veins and arteries. It’s therefore very fundamental, and something that we need to understand in our attempts to combat disease.

Going down to the smaller scale, to the level of the human cell, viscose forces become of dominant importance. Inertia becomes totally negligible. Surface tension effects can also be very important. Some fascinating problems arise in that area. It’s an area that has developed under the title “microhydrodynamics” or even “nanohydrodynamics”, if one goes to extremely small scales. There’s been a lot of excitement in that area over the last 20 years or so.

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