Grigory Barenblatt

Grigori Isaakovich Barenblatt (Russian Григорий Исаакович Баренблатт; born 10 July 1927 in Moscow; † 21 June 2018) was a Russian applied mathematician.

He was the son of the virologist Nadezhda Weniaminovna Kagan, who developed a vaccine against encephalitis and infected herself in a laboratory accident and died, and the Moscow endocrinologist Isaak Grigorievich Barenblatt, author of a widely published Therapeutic Manual. His grandfather was the mathematician Weniamin Kagan.

Barenblatt studied at Lomonosov University (Mekmat), graduating in 1950 and receiving his doctorate in 1953 under Andrei Kolmogorov. In 1957 he habilitated at Lomonosov University (Russian doctorate) and received the title of professor in 1962. After receiving his doctorate, he did research at the Institute of Petroleum of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and from 1961 he was head of the Department of Plasticity Theory at the Institute of Mechanics of Lomonosov University. From 1975 to 1992 he was head of the theoretical department in the Institute of Oceanography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. From 1992 to 1994 he was G. I. Taylor Professor of Hydrodynamics at the University of Cambridge, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1994.

He was Visiting Professor at the University of Paris VI in 1990, Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota in 1991 and 1994 (as Hill Professor in 1994), at the University of Rome (Tor Vergata) in 1992, at the Autonomous University in Madrid in 1993 and 1995/6, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995, Timoshenko Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley in 1996/97. From 1997 he was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at the same time professor at Berkeley.

He worked on hydrodynamics in porous media (for example, two-phase flow, petroleum, natural gas, groundwater in fractured rock), fracture mechanics, continuum mechanics of nonclassical media such as polymers, and turbulence, among other topics. He collaborated with Yakov Borisovich Seldovich for a long time on, for example, self-similar solutions and intermediate asymptotics (with applications in the theory of explosions and combustion and propagation of thin films). He was also co-editor of Seldowitsch's Collected Essays in this connection.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), the National Academy of Engineering, the Academia Europaea, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was an expatriate member of the Royal Society (2000) and of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1993, he received an M. A. (Master of Arts) degree from Cambridge.

He received the Timoshenko Medal in 2005, the Modesto Panetti Prize in 1995, the G. I. Taylor Medal of the US Society of Engineering Science in 1999, the Lagrange Medal of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1995, and the J. C. Maxwell Medal of the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1999. Barenblatt was an honorary doctor of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and of the Turin Polytechnic. He was a member of the Polish Society for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the Danish Centre for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics.

Fonts

• Flow, Deformation and Fracture, Cambridge University Press 2014
• Scaling, Cambridge University Press 2003
• Scaling, self-similarity and intermediate asymptotics, Cambridge University Press 1996
• Scaling phenomena in fluid mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1994
• Edited with Gérard Iooss, Daniel D. Joseph Nonlinear dynamics and turbulence, Pitman 1983
• Dimensional analysis, Gordon and Breach 1987
• with V. M. Entov, V. M. Ryzhik Theory of fluid flows through natural rocks, Kluwer 1990
• with Seldowitsch (Zeldovich), Maxwidadze: Mathematical Theory of Combustion and Explosion (Russian), 1980
• with Lisitzin: Hydrodynamics and Sedimentation (Russian), 1983