Talk:Ludwig Prandtl

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"After Hitler came to power in 1933 Prandtl acquiesced in the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues"

If you want to diffamate people, you should at least give some more details from different sources.

"... and went on to engage in numerous propaganda exercises aimed at maintaining Germany's standing in the international scientific community."

It is possible that he engaged in public for his country to bypass the informal international boykott - not of the Soviet Union or Poland, but of Germany! During the 1930s efforts of some countries resulted in rising exclusion of German contributions from international recognition. As those countries and specific persons want to have everything that happened within Germany between 1933-45 to be just propaganda and so on, your claim of "propaganda exercises" is just worthless.

So write down your very own propaganda or those of some book writers somewhere else.

... oh, you forgot to mention that Prandtl propably built the world's first wind tunnel. At least, his wind tunnel were built before the Wright Brothers were building theirs! Was this not mentioned in your fancy book?

Wind tunnels

There is a claim in the article that Prandtl may have built the first wind tunnel. "A History of Aerodynamics" by John D Anderson Jr (CUP) states that the first such, 18 in square and 10 feet long was built by Francis Wenham with a group of three other engineers. The starting point was a paper by Wenham to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (ASGB) in 1866, which led to the formation of a sub committee in 1870; it chose the engineers and provided funding. Exactly when the first data were taken is not given by Anderson, but sometime 1870-2 fits his account. By 1872 the tunnel had been displayed publicly in London. There is probably more detail in the Annual Reports of the ASGB (especially 1872), but the whole process seems well recorded and beyond dispute. It was crude, of course but gave useful info on e.g. lift to drag ratios and forces on inclined plates. I suggest we remove the claim.TSRL (talk) 19:53, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Header

Having looked at the header again I'd be inclined to revert to that of 2 June 2009. A lot of words were added by the next editor, without a great increase of content, though it is true Prandtl had things to say on compressibility. Reading Anderson, his strengths seem to have been those of the physicist (identifying the important parts of a problem) rather than the ability to get formal solutions to complete equations. There is a lot of confusion, it seems to me in the current header over his role as mathematician, physicist or engineer. The header should be more focussed and a reversion, with a nod to compressibility would, I think be better.TSRL (talk) 22:40, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Life and Research with Allied After WWII

I am sure I read somewhere that Prandtl had cooperate for some research and teaching to US Allied and he allowed them to access his research and work. I believe this should be mentioned in this new paragraph of the Article.