Chorin's work involves developing methods for solving physics and fluid mechanics problems computationally. His early work introduced several widely used numerical methods for solving the Navier-Stokes equations, including the method of artificial compressibility,[1] the projection method,[2] and vortex methods.[3] He has made numerous contributions to turbulence theory.[4] In recent years he has been developing methods for prediction in the face of uncertainty [5] and for filtering and data assimilation.[6]
Chorin was born on 25 June 1938 in Warsaw, Poland. Born just one year before Hitler's invasion, his family fled Poland through Lithuania and Russia before spending 10 years living in Israel and 11 years living in Switzerland. Chorin came to the United States at 23 for graduate studies, nurturing his interest in fluid dynamics by working on the equations responsible for predicting ocean tides.[7]
Chorin received the Ing. Dipl. Physics degree from the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in 1961, an M.S. in Mathematics from New York University in 1964, and a PhD in Mathematics from New York University in 1966. Chorin stayed at New York University as a researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences until 1969 when he was promoted to assistant professor and then associate professor the following year.
Chorin is widely recognized for his mentoring of graduate students[8] and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have become nationally and internationally recognized scientists in their own right. In 2008 he was honored with the Sarlo mentoring award by the University of California, Berkeley.[9]
Chorin, A.J., Hald, O.H., and Kupferman, R., Optimal prediction and the Mori-Zwanzig representation of irreversible processes, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 97 (2000), pp. 2968–2973.
Chorin, A.J. and Tu, X., Implicit sampling for particle filters, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106 (2009), pp. 17249–17254.
