John Trevor Stuart

Abstract In 1947 the award of a Royal Scholarship at Imperial College’s Department of Mathematics launched Trevor Stuart from a working-class family in Leicester into a career in the Aerodynamics Division of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) just at a time when post-war government scientific institutions were growing rapidly. The outstanding nature of his early work as a pioneer of the theory of hydrodynamic stability was formally recognized in 1961 when, at the age of 32, he became the youngest Senior Principal Scientific Officer with a Special Merit Award in the Scientific Civil Service. The reorganization and transfer of NPL’s Aerodynamics Division to RAE Farnborough ultimately led to Trevor moving to a chair in his old department at Imperial in 1966. Trevor’s pioneering work on fluid flow instabilities in systems where initially small disturbances rapidly grow to finite values was a key development in the theoretical understanding of the first stage (weakly nonlinear) of transition to full-scale turbulence. Plane parallel flow and circular Couette flow were two examples to which he devoted much time and energy. Although reserved in manner, Trevor was a natural leader and a good judge of scientific potential in younger colleagues. In the latter part of his career he served on the Council of the Royal Society, as a head of department (twice), as a Dean of the Royal College of Science within Imperial, as a chair of the (then) Science and Engineering Research Council Mathematics Committee and as President of the London Mathematical Society.