Theodor Meyer
Theodor Meyer (July 1, 1882 – March 8, 1972 in Bad Bevensen, Germany) was a German mathematician, a student of Ludwig Prandtl, and a founder of the scientific discipline now known as compressible flow or gas dynamics. Biography As a youth, Meyer studied mathematics and physics. He was privileged to learn from several of the great minds in these fields, including David Hilbert, Carl Runge, Hermann Minkowski, and Ludwig Prandtl. He and Prandtl made a great team, for Prandtl's intuitive and experimental approach to fluid mechanics has become legendary, and Meyer complemented his advisor's strengths with a formidable mathematical talent. During the first decade of the 20th century, Meyer worked under Prandtl's guidance at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany on the theory of supersonic gas flows, then a brand-new field of study that we now call compressible flow or gas dynamics. In particular, Meyer developed the theory for how gases traveling at supersonic speed slow down abruptly through oblique shock waves, and how they accelerate smoothly through what we now call a Prandtl–Meyer expansion fan. Prandtl first showed images of such flows captured by Schlieren photography, then the underlying theory appeared in Meyer's Ph.D. dissertation, hence the present terminology