L'Epee d'Academicien du Alexandre Favre: 21 Octobre 1978

In French. 1978 signed and inscribed first edition Imprimerie Mazan (Paris), 5 7/8 x 8 1/4 inches tall stapled paperbound in silver grey printed covers, 67 pp. plus colophon. Light soiling and modest rubbing and edgewear to covers. Nicely inscribed in French and signed by Alexandre Favre (1911 - 2005) on the blank front free-endpaper to Michael S. Longuet-Higgins (1925 - 2016), a mathematician and oceanographer at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), Cambridge University, England and Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego, who devised the theory of the origin of microseisms. Otherwise, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked - of this scarce tribute to engineer and physicist Favre, renowned for his works on turbulence. Not in OCLC. ~X~ With tributes to Favre by French Academy members Maurice Roy, Doyen Rouard, Jean Gaviglio, Leslie S.G. Kovasznay, Henri Lacombe and Edmond Brun, as well as a lengthy response from Alexandre Favre. Born in Toulon, France to a family of renowned engineers and shipbuilders, Favre studied aircraft wing profiles under Andre Marchand and received his graduate degree in 1938 in Paris, going to work for the French Aviation Ministry, for whom he developed a new compression system which had to be suppressed to avoid the technology falling into the hands of the occupying Nazi regime in France, instead smuggled to England to help the allies. In 1961, he created ???l'Institut de Mecanique Statistique de la Turbulence (IMST) in Marseille, and he served as director for some 20 years. His works included studies involving the supersonic wind tunnel and turbulent exchanges between the ocean and atmosphere. His discoveries enabled the development of supersonic aircraft and have found many applications in the field of meteorology. He was a co-author, with other members of the French Academy from several disciplines, of Chaos and Determinism: Turbulence as a Paradigm for Complex Systems Converging Toward Final States (Johns Hopkins University Press 1995).…