Unravelling how turbulence works
It takes a special kind of mind to seek to understand turbulence in all its forms, from the crash of ocean waves to the chaos of morning traffic.
But as the head of the Centre for Stability, Instability and Turbulence at New York University Abu Dhabi, that’s exactly what Prof Masmoudi wants to do.
Raised in Tunisia, in 1992 a teenage Masmoudi became the first Arab to win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
After graduating from the renowned Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1996 and receiving a doctorate from Paris Dauphine University three years later, he earned international acclaim and prizes for his work on the nightmarish mathematics behind turbulence.
But now he plans to go further as he wants to understand how turbulence can flare up from seemingly stable situations.
“Stability is a word we use in our daily lives, not only in maths and physics,” he said.
“What’s interesting is that the kind of questions we ask in maths or physics, you can ask in social sciences, political sciences, or even relationships.”
This view was inspired in part by his intellectual ancestors, academics of the Islamic Golden Age such as the “father of algebra” Muhammad Al Khwarizmi, as well as others who advanced the boundaries of knowledge while the West languished in the Dark Ages.
“They were who I looked up to while I was young. They were some of my idols,” Prof Masmoudi said.
He said he hoped to encourage more people to follow in his footsteps and seeks career in research, and in maths especially.
“Arabs usually think about being engineers or doing this kind of academic research. But if we go back to Muslim mathematicians in the past, they were in forefront of the field,” he said.