About this item
With Wind Wizard Siobhan Roberts brings us the story of Alan Davenport - the father of modern wind engineering who investigated how wind navigates the obstacle course of the earths natural and built environments--and how when not properly heeded wind causes buildings and bridges to teeter unduly sway with abandon and even collapse In Davenport received a confidential telephone call from two engineers requesting tests on a pair of towers that promised to be the tallest in the world His resulting wind studies on New Yorks World Trade Center advanced the art and science of wind engineering with one pioneering innovation after another Establishing the first dedicated boundary layer wind tunnel laboratory for civil engineering structures Davenport enabled the study of the atmospheric region from the earths surface to three thousand feet where the air churns with turbulent eddies the average wind speed increasing with height The boundary layer wind tunnel mimics these windy marbled striations in order to test models of buildings and bridges that inevitably face the wind when built Over the years Davenports revolutionary lab investigated and improved the wind-worthiness of the worlds greatest structures including the Sears Tower the John Hancock Tower Shanghais World Financial Center the CN Tower the iconic Golden Gate Bridge the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge the Sunshine Skyway and the proposed crossing for the Strait of Messina linking Sicily with mainland Italy Chronicling Davenports innovations by analyzing select projects this popular-science book gives an illuminating behind-the-scenes view into the practice of wind engineering and insight into Davenports steadfast belief that there is neither a structure too tall nor too long as long as it is supported by sound wind science.
About the Author
Siobhan Roberts is a journalist and biographer whose work focuses on mathematics and science. She was born in Belleville, Ontario, and splits her time between there, Toronto, and elsewhere (most recently Berlin, as writer-in-residence at Humboldt-Universität's Institut für Mathematik) . While writing her new book, GENIUS AT PLAY, a biography of mathematician John Horton Conway, she was a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her first book, KING OF INFINITE SPACE, won the Mathematical Association of America's 2009 Euler Prize for expanding the public's view of mathematics.
