John Ockendon

Who is John Ockendon?

Professor John Richard Ockendon FRS is an applied mathematician noted especially for his contribution to fluid dynamics and novel applications of mathematics to real world problems. He is a Professor at Oxford University and Fellow of St Catherine's College, the first Director of the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics and a Director of the Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics and System Engineering.

His initial fluid mechanics interests included hypersonic aerodynamics, creeping flow, sloshing and channel flows and leading to flows in porous media, ship hydrodynamics and models for flow separation.

He moved on to free and moving boundary problems. He pioneered the study of diffusion-controlled moving boundary problems in the 1970s his involvement centring on models for phase changes and elastic contact problems all built around the paradigm of the Hele-Shaw free boundary problem. Other industrial collaboration has led to new ideas for lens design, fibre manufacture, extensional and surface-tension- driven flows and glass manufacture, fluidised-bed models, semiconductor device modelling and a range of other problems in mechanics and heat and mass transfer, especially scattering and ray theory, nonlinear wave propagation, nonlinear oscillations, nonlinear diffusion and impact in solids and liquids.