December is a popular month for software releases judging by the number of announcements in this week’s post. There’s also an article about the use of CFD to study respiration in reptiles. The image shown here is from an article announcing a mathematical proof of a fundamental law of turbulence that you’ll probably want to read.

Intelligence

• Mathematicians have proved Batchelor’s Law which describes how temperature variations are distributed in a fluid. The proof required expertise in PDEs, probability, dynamical systems, and chaos theory.
• A six-week introduction to AI is available online for free courtesy of Finland.

From Pointwise

• A lot of us are going to be in Orlando for AIAA SciTech and among many other things we’ll be throwing a party with our friends from Tecplot and FieldView. Read all the details on our website.
• We’re running a 5-minute survey on the types and sizes of meshes you’re generating. Can you help us out, please?
• We’re now accepting applications for our summer 2020 internships. Now is the best time to apply while you’re home from school for winter break.

Events

• The 14th International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing (GMP 2020) will be held in Okinawa on 13-15 May 2020. (Abstract deadline has already passed.)
• Applied CCM is hosting the Symposium on OpenFOAM Technology (SOFT 2020) on 22 April 2020 in Melbourne, Australia.
• The UK Fluids Conference 2020 will be held at the University of Southampton on 1-3 September 2020. Abstracts are due 17 April.

A very cool architectural use of facets, or “fractals” as the article refers to them, on this “tectonic” wall. Image from architect magazine.com.

Fluids

• For 100 years, researchers have been flummoxed by the fact that bubbles in narrow tubes don’t rise while in wider tubes they rise easily to the top. It took an undergraduate student to reveal why. [Spoiler alert: they do rise but v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.]

FYFD has this cool GIF (pronounced jiff) of adaptive mesh refinement and a video of more. Image from fyfluiddynamics.com.

Computing and Visualization and a Job

• Looking for a cloud HPC provider? Check out Alces Flight.
• AWS thinks HPC in the cloud is all about the network.
• Engineering.com shares why ANSYS says you ought to be doing your simulations in the cloud.
• Enjoy this animated visualization of Moore’s Law.
• Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for September 2019.
  • and October 2019.
• Argonne National Lab has an opening for a postdoc CFD Application Engineer.

Software

• I just discovered Mathpix Snip which claims to convert handwritten equations to LaTeX and it seems like magic.
• Read a little bit about the capabilities of SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation 2020.
• Beta CAE released v19.1.5 of their software suite.
• Zenotech launched a new version of zCFD.
• FieldView 19 uses hybrid parallelism to draw your streamlines up to 13x faster than before.
• Open Cascade launched CAD Processor v1.0.0 for preparing geometry models for downstream applications such as CFD. Read more here.
• Engineering.com writes about HyperWorks X and its new UI.
• Four of GrabCAD’s top 6 models of 2019 are road vehicles and the fifth is a car engine.
• The OpenFOAM Foundation launched its annual fundraising drive back in November. You can purchase a maintenance plan for as little as €1,000 to help them reach their goal for 2020 of €250,000.
• OpenFOAM v1912 was released.
• ANSYS is now included in the NASDAQ’s index of the top 100 non-financial company stocks.
• Siemens released Parasolid v32.0.

You can always count on our friends at GridPro for nice structured grid pictures. These are from their article on multi-block meshing of marine propellers. 

CFD for…

• students’ Formula SAE cars.
• training firefighters.
• HVAC.
• predicting supercar downforce.
• mitigating sewage odors.
• the lungs of monitor lizards (the most complicated lungs of any reptile).
• a McLaren MP4-12C GT Sprint (which just happens to be up for auction).
• motorcycles.

Our friends at Applied CCM meshed Santa’s pod-racer sleigh. Image from appliedccm.com.

Again with the squares?

I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. Byron Kim, the artist responsible for the work below, was just awarded the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize, given annually to a mid-career painter. Kim is described as one of today’s foremost abstract painters.

Interestingly, Kim has a habit each Sunday of making a painting of the sky.

And yes, that prize is named after the actor’s father, an accomplished abstract painter.

Byron Kim, Synocdoche, 1991-1992. Image from artnews.com. See links above.

OK, just one more.

R.H. Quaytman, iamb (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field): Chapter 12, 2009. source

Bonus: Although Christmas is now behind us, I thought you braniacs would enjoy this mathematical Christmas puzzle. For example, how many zeros does 245! end with?