Arkady Tsinober

Professor Arkady Tsinober passed away on December 11, 2020. He was born in Kiev on January 29, 1937. His family escaped the Nazi occupation of Kiev and in 1945, after the end of World War II, moved to Riga. There he finished high school and in 1954 entered the famous Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, from which he graduated in 1959 with honors. In 1960, he came back to Riga and started working in the Latvian Academy of Science, Institute of Physics. He completed his PhD thesis in 1965 and his Dr. Sci. thesis (equivalent to habilitation) in 1975. He then applied for repatriation to Israel and, as expected, was refused. At that time, he was already a well-known scientist in the West and, with help of his friends in Israel and in the West, after 3 years of his adamant struggle, in 1978 he got the permission to leave Soviet Union. In 1978, he became a full professor of Tel Aviv University.

During his studies at Moscow University, his teachers were Kolmogorov, Monin, and Yaglom, and through that period he developed an interest and addiction to turbulence. In Tel Aviv, he created new laboratories from scratch that deal with turbulence in stratified flows, fascinating double-diffusive convection, and the application of MHD methods, with which he was familiar from his work in Institute of Physics, to new types of turbulence measurements, such as vorticity, in water instead of liquid metals. The apogee was building multisensor hot-wire probes (21 wires) to measure the full velocity vector and all velocity gradients for measurements in wind tunnels. The final goal was to conduct the most advanced experiments in the field on the physics of turbulence in the atmosphere. And he was not just organizing the work and designing the sensors, he literally made them himself using microscope and manipulators that he designed.

He communicated and collaborated with many scientists around the world. He published about 200 papers and 4 books, 2 in the Soviet Union devoted to MHD flows and MHD turbulence and 2 in the West dealing with the physics and essence of turbulence. From 1999–2006 he served as Tel Aviv University Chair in Basic Research in Turbulence and from 2006–2009 as Marie Curie Chair in Fundamental and Conceptual Aspects of Turbulent Flows. In 1999 he was a Visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University, UK, and in 2006 he was a Pauli Fellow at Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI), Vienna, Austria. Starting in 2000, he served as an Associate editor of Applied Mechanics Reviews section on turbulence.

He held an appointment as a member of the Scientific Panel on Fluid Mechanics for the 2011 International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

He organized and supervised scientific seminars: 1971–75 Latvian Seminar on MHD Turbulent Flows, 1993–2006 Israel Seminar on Turbulence, 2006–2009 Turbulence seminars, Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College, London. He always considered those seminars as an important task for the scientific community especially for students. For the same reason he was strongly involved in the Organization of International Meetings.

In 1975-1978, during the period of his refused repatriation, he organized a seminar on Jewish Culture, which became very popular at that time when Latvia was still a part of the Soviet Union.