Antony Jameson, one of the founding fathers of modern computational fluid dynamics passed away on June 11, 2026 at the age of 91.
Much has been written about him (e.g. this piece) lately, and his wonderful Stanford website is still active (so beautiful... a must visit!) You can hear from the legend himself in his long form interview with Neil Ashton.
Several people who were closer to him than me have also written a lot, and so I'll keep my tributes brief in the form of anecdotes. I was a colleague of his for 4+ years at Stanford, and shared many many long discussions with him, though we never formally collaborated.
Here is a picture from when he took me to his office and showed me the output of the first ever simulation of a transonic flow over a sphere. He did this in 1972, I think. Mach number values are printed at the grid points (multiply by 0.01). We both chuckled at the beautiful flow visualization that reveals the shock :)
Now, on to a couple of anecdotes...
The "Student"
In the Spring of 2011, I taught a course called Aerodynamics & Aeroacoustics of Rotorcraft. I have fond memories of it because I walked students through the basics of unsteady aerodynamics and aeroacoustics and had them write some pretty powerful codes**. My fondest memory of that time involved Tony Jameson. Just before the course began, he asked me if he could sit through the lectures. I was intrigued and said yes, thinking he'd just attend a few lectures. He attended almost all of the lectures and asked so many questions that it added to the learning of the students (and the lecturer!).
In fact, I think he missed only 2 lectures, and I remember being shocked when he came over to my office and said "Karthik - I will miss two lectures because I am traveling. I wanted to let you know because I don't want you to think I lost interest". That made me feel so good.
Very early on in the course I showed the picture of a swashplate mechanism and gave some high level intuition of how it worked. He had zero familiarity with it, but just figured out on the fly how it worked, and helped me out.
I remember a lecture in aeroacoustics where I was stuck on a derivation for about 10 minutes and the class was kinda losing interest.. and Tony stepped up and we figured it out together.
The "Tinkerer"
One of the things I loved about Tony was that he'd always be working on some ideas with pen and paper. Completely random things. I used to do that too.. but I wasn't a 75 year old legend running a group of a dozen PhD students. Now.. when I spend 50+ hours a week on "expeditions", I use Tony as an excuse.
Sometime in 2011, the Aero/Astro department hosted a speaker who talked about cooperative control. Tony and I were in attendance, and as always, we'd exchange some thoughts after the lecture. The next day I saw Tony in the hallway and said.. "Tony.. I think I have an idea for a clean solution of a related optimization problem, and there might be some tricks from CFD that we can bring to the stability analysis". Tony walked me to his office and showed me a note.. he had solved that problem overnight. I think he's documented it here and here.
I have many other memories of Tony from opening his laptop in the middle of a conference talk and showing that a 3D wing optimization was solved by the time he completed the talk; characteristically british comments on sports; helping (not his own) students with the prelims, etc. but as i said, others have written about these.
The power of figuring things out yourself
The common thread here is that Tony simply loved ideas and loved figuring things out himself. These are the same things that drive me, and that is perhaps why I feel a deeper sense of loss than I expected.
I also think I should write this out because there might be a lesson here: sometimes professors say "oh! that has been done before.. don't waste your time on it" Perhaps the decentralized control example falls in that class... an expert in that domain probably isn't impressed by the result (I don't know..) but never underestimate the benefit one derives from pursuing random ideas and figuring things out, even if it takes a while to do so. It lets us see the world better and develop a certain level of depth and connections. I think academics these days don't dedicate enough time to random explorations.
Also, both of the anecdotes above are from 2011. That year, Tony & his group published 35 papers. Almost unheard of in CFD (especially then). We can find time for random explorations.
Tony was amazing because he was intensely curious and got down to the basics of any idea he felt was interesting. Hope this is an inspiration for all to go tinker, rediscover and reinvent!
In any case... rest in peace, Tony.
** The other fond memory of this class is that it was the first introduction to rotary wing vehicles for a couple of students who would later play important technical roles in the field of e-VTOLs: Alex Stoll (Joby Aviation) and Geoff Bower (Airbus, Archer). 