Nikolay Yegorovich Zhukovsky

Who was Nikolay Yegorovich Zhukovsky?

Nikolay Yegorovich Zhukovsky was a Russian scientist and a founding father of modern aero- and hydrodynamics. Whereas contemporary scientists scoffed at the idea of human flight, Zhukovsky was the first to undertake the study of airflow.

His name is usually romanised as Joukovsky or Joukowsky in the literature. See for example Joukowsky transform, Kutta–Joukowski theorem and so on.

Zhukovsky was born in the village of Orekhovo, Vladimir Governorate, Russian Empire. In 1868 he graduated from Moscow University where he studied under August Davidov. From 1872 he was a professor at the Imperial Technical School. In 1904 he established the world's first Aerodynamic Institute in Kachino near Moscow. From 1918 he was the head of TsAGI.

He was the first scientist to explain mathematically the origin of aerodynamic lift, through his circulation hypothesis, the first to establish that the lift force generated by a body moving through an ideal fluid is proportional to the velocity and the circulation around the body. He used a conformal mathematical transformation to define the ideal shape of the aerodynamic profile having as essential elements a rounded nose, double surface, cambered or symmetrical, and a sharp tail. He built the first wind tunnel in Russia. He was also responsible for the eponymous water hammer equation used by civil engineers. This is usually known as the Joukowsky equation.