KUTTA

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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3.11.1867 Pitschen/PL - 25.12.1944 Fürstenfeldbruck-Munich/D

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Wilhelm Kutta studied at the University of Breslau, today's Wrocł aw in Poland, mathematics from 1885 to 1890, moved then to the University of Munich where he graduated in 1894. He continued as an assistant until 1903 with a two years break at the University of Cambridge. He obtained the PhD title from Munich University in 1900 and was a Lecturer from 1902. He moved to the University of Jena in 1909 as a professor of applied mathematics, continued one year later in Aachen and finally was appointed professor at TH Stuttgart in 1912, where he stayed until retirement in 1935.

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Kutta's name is known to applied mathematicians and to engineers in fluid mechanics. He presented in collaboration with Runge around 1900 a method for solving ordinary differential equations with a step procedure. Kutta also considered plane flows in aerodynamics and derived the Kutta-Zhukovsky relation between lift of a body and its circulation. Until the end of the 19th century, aviation techniques possessed no theory of air resistance and lift due to a wing. Kutta considered the flow around a wing as the superposition of a translatory and a circulating flow. Accordingly, the pressure on one side of the wing is larger than on the other. Circulation thus results in a lift, as was found by Kutta in his 1902 paper and in 1906 verified by Nikolai E. Zhukovsky (1847-1921). Kutta reported in the 1910 paper on the application of conformal mapping to wings by investigating the effects of wing curvature and wing thickness. These findings have influenced later the works of both Richard von Mises (1883-1953) and Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953). Once at Stuttgart, he has not continued research in aerodynamics. Kutta was then rather interested in the history of mathematics where his knowledge of the Arabian language was helpful.

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_{Biener, K. (1994). 50. Todestag von Wilhelm Kutta. RZ-Mitteilungen ETH Zürich 8: 48-49. P}

_{Kutta, W.M. (1902). Auftriebskräfte in strömenden Flüssigkeiten. Illustrierte Aeronautische Mitteilung 6: 133-135.}

_{Kutta, W. (1910). Über eine mit den Grundlagen des Flugproblems in Beziehung stehende Strömung. Sitzungsbericht Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 1-58.}

_{Poggendorff, J.C. (1904). Kutta, Martin Wilhelm. Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch}

_{4: 821; 5: 695; 6: 1437; 7a: 975. Barth: Leipzig, with bibliography.}

_{Schulz, W. (1982). Kutta, Wilhelm. Neue Deutsche Biographie 13: 348-350. Dunckler & Humblot: Berlin.}