John Laufer

Laufer was an experimental fluid dynamicist whose classic mid-20th-century measurements of turbulence in channels and pipes became benchmark data still used to test theories and simulations; he chaired the aerospace engineering department at the University of Southern California. He earned his doctorate at Caltech and worked at NACA and JPL. The public biographies reviewed here do not document his religious background; he appears in Jinfo's listing of Jewish figures in fluid mechanics.