News & EventsThe Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The Stephen H. Davis Lecture is in memorial of Stephen H. Davis, who was the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Applied Mathematics and McCormick Institute Professor. Professor Davis’s contributions to fluid mechanics and materials science are well known, and the lecture celebrates his many fundamental and impactful contributions.
Interfacial Dynamics Pioneer Stephen H. Davis (1939–2021), Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics
Stephen H. Davis Memorial Tributes
2026 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2026 Davis Lecture will be held on Monday, October 19th, at 4:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Sidney Nagel of the University of Chicago. The lecture can be viewed here.
Sidney Nagel
Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor, Deptartment of Physics, James Franck Institute, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College,
University of Chicago
Memory Formation in Particle Packings
A disordered solid created by packing spheres in a box has a myriad of stable configurations that defy straightforward enumeration and characterization. Since structure often determines function, each distinct arrangement potentially corresponds to different material behavior. The question naturally arises: How many mechanically stable ways are there to pack N identical spheres in a box? This has the spirit of a “Fermi estimation problem”, but one for which we do not have an answer; we do not know how to account for rearranging the particles to produce packings with different connectivity. We therefore resort to measurement.
Stable packings of N identical soft spheres in d dimensions lie at the minima of a vast (Nd)-dimensional potential energy landscape. Starting from random positions, the particles can relax to mechanical equilibrium; all initial conditions that end at the same minimum belong to the same catchment basin. We find a very wide distribution of basin volumes. These results suggest how to understand the imprinting of memories in solids.
Sidney Nagel was educated at Columbia University (B.A. in 1969) and at Princeton University (Ph.D. in 1975). He did a postdoc at Brown and then moved to the University of Chicago in 1976 where he has remained and is now the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the James Franck and Enrico Fermi Institutes. Nagel is a condensed-matter experimentalist focusing on problems where the physics of disorder and far-from-equilibrium behavior play crucial roles. Of particular delight is when table-top experiments have analogs in disparate fields at wildly different scales. In particular, he has studied the glass transition, the phenomenology of granular material, and the physics of jamming; he has also focused on pattern and singularity formation in fluid interfaces, and the formation of stains left behind by evaporating liquid drops. A current interest is the investigation of memory formation in out-of-equilibrium matter. He has worked to make his science accessible to a broad public by emphasizing the inherent beauty of the phenomena he studies in the laboratory.
2025 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2025 Davis Lecture was held on Monday, October 27, at 4:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Michael Shelley of the Flatiron Institute. The lecture can be viewed here.
Michael Shelley
Director of the Center for Computational Biology
Flatiron Institute;
Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics
Courant Institute
New York University
Self-Organization, Flows, and Transport in (and of) Living Cells
2024 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2024 Davis Lecture was held on Monday, October 21, at 4:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Kathleen Stebe of the University of Pennsylvania. The lecture can be viewed here.
Kathleen J. Stebe
Richer and Elizabeth Goodwin Professor of Engineering and Applied Science
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Swimming in Nematic Liquid Crystals
2023 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2023 Davis Lecture was held on Monday, October 23, at 4:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Michael D. Graham of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The lecture can be viewed here.
Michael D. Graham
Steenbock Professor of Engineering and Harvey D. Spangler Professor,
Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Data, Dynamics, and Manifolds: Machine Learning Approaches for Modeling and Controlling Complex Flows
2022 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2022 Davis Lecture was held on Wednesday, May 25, at 3:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Grae Worster of the University of Cambridge. The lecture was recorded and can be viewed online here.
Grae Worster
Professor of Fluid Dynamics, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
The Dynamics of Super-absorbent Hydrogels
2021 Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The 2021 Davis Symposium was held on Monday, October 4, at 4:00 PM, featuring a lecture by Harry Swinney of the University of Texas at Austin. The lecture was recorded and can be viewed online here.
Harry Swinney
Professor, Physics, University of Texas, Austin
Crystallization in a periodically perturbed random granular medium
Inaugural Stephen H. Davis Lecture
The inagural Stephen H. Davis Symposium was held October 15, 2019, featuring lectures by John Hinch of University of Cambridge, G.M. "Bud" Homsy of University of Washington, Detlef Lohse of University of Twente, and Parviz Moin of Stanford University.
Symposium Speakers
John Hinch
Professor, Fluid Dynamics, University of Cambridge
Levitation and Locomotion on an Air-table of Plates with Herringbone Grooves
G.M. "Bud" Homsy
Affiliate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington
Some Interfacial Flow Problems
Detlef Lohse
Professor, Physics of Fluids, University of Twente
Segregation in Multicomponent Droplet Evaporation
Parviz Moin
Founding Director of the Center for Turbulence Research and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University
Probing Turbulence Physics Using Numerical Simulation Databases - A Case Study in Predictive Science