Geoffrey S. S. Ludford

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Geoffrey S. S. Ludford (February 2, 1928 – December 11, 1986) was a British-born American mathematician who worked on fluid dynamics, combustion and magnetohydrodynamics. He was born in London and grew up there. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Cambridge in 1948 at age 20. He began graduate studies at Cambridge with Leslie Howarth but moved to Harvard to study under Richard von Mises. He earned his PhD in 1951 under von Mises, with the degree conferred by Cambridge. He then joined the University of Maryland and later moved to Cornell University in 1961.

Ludford helped complete von Mises’s book on compressible flow after von Mises’s death, with help from Hilda Geiringer. His research covered fluid dynamics, combustion and magnetohydrodynamics. He supervised doctoral students including John D. Buckmaster, Moshe Matalon and Pamela Cook. In 1986, a NATO advanced research workshop on mathematical modeling in combustion was held in Lyon in his honor; its proceedings were published by Springer in 1988.

Geoffrey Ludford died in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 58.