History of fluid mechanics

The study of fluid mechanics goes back at least to the days of ancient Greece, when Archimedes investigated fluid statics and buoyancy. Medieval Persian & Arab natural philosophers, including Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Al-Khazini, combined that earlier work with dynamics^[1] to presage the later development of fluid dynamics. Rapid advancement in fluid mechanics began with Leonardo da Vinci (observation and experiment), Evangelista Torricelli (barometer), Isaac Newton (viscosity) and Blaise Pascal (hydrostatics), and was continued by Daniel Bernoulli with the introduction of mathematical fluid dynamics in Hydrodynamica (1738). Inviscid flow was further analyzed by various mathematicians (Leonhard Euler, d'Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Poisson) and viscous flow was explored by a multitude of engineers including Poiseuille and Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen. Further mathematical justification was provided by Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes in the Navier–Stokes equations, and boundary layers were investigated (Ludwig Prandtl), while various scientists (Osborne Reynolds, Andrey Kolmogorov, Geoffrey Ingram Taylor) advanced the understanding of fluid viscosity and turbulence.