In memoriam: Alfred Kluwick (1942–2022)

Abstract

Wien and former member of the Editorial Board of ZAMP, passed away at his home on February 2nd, 2022, at the age of 79 after a 2-year illness. The fluid mechanics community lost a brilliant scientist, a most esteemed colleague, highly gifted teacher, and friend. Alfred Kluwick was born in Vienna on June 28th, 1942, and spent the first years of his life in Pinzgau, district Zell am See in Salzburg, Austria, where his strong affection for mountains and the living nature arose and which accompanied him all his life. After attending high school in Vienna, he studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic University (TH) Vienna (now TU Wien). With his wife Christl, whom he met when he was 18, he has two daughters, Veronika and Ursula.In 1965 he completed his studies in mechanical engineering at the TH Vienna with an experimental work on the shallow water channel entitled Flow past a supersonic airfoil with landing flap under the supervision of Klaus Oswatitsch, who became his highly respected academic teacher. For his dissertation Problems of perturbation theory in wave propagation processes, he was awarded a doctorate in 1970, then habilitated 1974 in fluid mechanics and in 1975 he was appointed associate professor at TH Vienna. Academic visits lasting more than 2 years at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg/USA and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor/USA in the early 1980s had a great impact on Alfred Kluwick, where he engaged in a lively professional exchange with the theoretical aerodynamicists Fig. 1. Alfred Kluwick at the organ of the Karlskirche in Vienna on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of TU Wien,