Giordano Lipari

My essay for Aeon has paired together a reading of one of the most marine chapters of the Odyssey with a review of the word usage for wave breaking in the ancient Greek canon. The story hinges on the shore as the geophysical scenery where land, sea, waves, human endeavours and metaphors come together. Across such a great time divide I wove together considerations on the reliability of texts, conventional mechanics of sea waves, and interpretations of human tensions and intentions. Several links in the essay point to resources that clarify either the content or the challenge: they can open up towards greater elaborations or narrow down to the raw materials. Aeon has kindly granted me autonomy in selecting the visuals. All in all, I hope that that throwback of two-three thousand years unfolded to the liking of readers with varied backgrounds

Environmental and computational hydrodynamics is the expertise I gained in my education. Think of the motions that range from slow and wide to rapid and narrow above and below the surface of seas, reservoirs, rivers and other bodies of liquid. Think then of the effort of ‘simulating’ these motions with conceptual models that lead to quantification and detailed insight. Even at its barest that is a multidisciplinary effort. Application has trained me in pieces of classical mechanics, calculus and numerics, software coding and hardware execution. Real appreciation of written and spoken languages has then enabled a detour into an immersive rediscovery of classical antiquity, to the effects visible in the Aeon essay. Other water-centered topics I engage(d) directly with are, for example, the tides and storm surges in the Dutch Wadden Sea, a world heritage site; the ways to describe flows as clouds of particles in motion; the dispersion of water discharges into the sea; and the critique of at times poorly screened experimental measurements

From hands-on experience I have come to distinguish research as discovery and review, and expert advice as fetching and combining established knowledge. The inclination to share insights, reach out to stakeholders and foster empowerment has been a drive for disseminating knowledge through consultancy as well as skills through training. In the latter case the separation between the domain-specific and the domain-agnostic becomes blurred. So I have provided and designed training in academic publishing, presentation skills, influencing skills and programming skills (look up The Carpentries) especially for early researchers

The ingredient of my recipes are thus ± books ± computers ± data ± humans ± water almost anywhere, dosed according to the situation. Academic research projects, consultancy assignments, impromptu collaborations, and own endeavours have brought about contributions to peer-reviewed journals, conferences, lectures and, thanks to Aeon, on-line magazines

Written with my brain’s GPT, for better or for worse

September 2024

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Freelancer based in the Netherlands · Postdocs at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands and the University of Manchester, UK · Ph.D. in Hydraulics at the University Federico II of Naples, Italy