A Glance Back and Outlook of Computational Fluid Dynamics (Keynote Paper)

The development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be traced back as far as the early 1900’s. The pioneering efforts by Richardson [1], Courant, Friedrichs, and Lewy [2], Southwell [3], Von Neumann [4], Lax [5], as well as Godunov [6] address the fundamental issues in numerical analyses for CFD. It is immediately clear that a major portion of these efforts was focused on one of the most difficult problems in resolving the discontinuous fluid phenomena in a discretized space — the Riemann problem [7]. As it will be seen later, it remains the most studied problem in CFD. However, if one is interested in the viscous flow simulation, Thom [8] probably obtained the first-ever numerical solution by solving the partial differential equation for a low speed flow past a circular cylinder. For a scholarly description of the CFD historical perspective, the books by Roach [9] and Tannehill, Anderson, and Pletcher [10] are highly recommended.