90^th Birthday Celebration for Emeritus Prof. Geoffrey Lilley, OBE.

A one-day Symposium on Noise and Turbulence was held at the University on 11 December 2009 in honour and celebration of the 90th birthday of Emeritus Prof. Geoffrey Lilley. Prof. Lilley was Head of the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics from 1964 until 1982.

He formally retired in 1983 but has remained active in his field of research, which mostly concerns the study of turbulence and the generation of aircraft noise. More recently his interests have expanded to encompass cosmology. In November, days after his 90th birthday, he gave a presentation concerning "The silent flight of the owl" at an international meeting in Hong Kong.

The Symposium held at Southampton was sponsored by the School of Engineering Sciences, the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research and the Solent Branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society, the last of which Prof. Lilley has been President for over 20 years (no-one can quite remember how long!). It was attended by over 60 delegates, including former and present colleagues, collaborators and students, some of whom had travelled across the Atlantic specifically to attend.

The delegates were treated to an illuminating - and at times amusing - account of Prof. Lilley's career and his outstanding contributions to his field of study, as well as more recent developments in aeroacoustics. In the early days the facilities available for carrying out his work on jet noise were primitive and scarce (often having to be begged or borrowed, if not actually stolen!) and yet much of Geoffrey's pioneering work is still having repercussions today.

At the banquet held in the evening after the Symposium Prof. Lilley gave an account of his involvement with the noise certification of Concorde back in the 1970's, which required not only technical ingenuity but also diplomatic skills when dealing with the politicians of the day.

Prof. Lilley was awarded an OBE in 1981 and in 1983 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Aeroacoustics Medal of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). For many years after his retirement from Southampton he worked with colleagues at NASA in the USA. In 2004 the University conferred the award of an Honorary DSc on him and recently he was made a Fellow of the AIAA.

Many of the delegates, and indeed former colleagues who were unable to attend the Symposium, provided short accounts of their memories of Prof. Lilley’s contributions to his field of study and in many cases their own career development. These have been compiled into a short booklet which may be viewed here.