FAQ: Why Navier-Stalks?

Navier-Stalks is a play on words. In the early 19th Century, Messrs Navier and Stokes devised equations for studying the flow of fluids. Since then, the Navier-Stokes equations have baffled and frustrated many a mathematician because they have non-linear properties which make them very hard to solve.

I was in Japan attending a conference, at which an eminent Professor gave a talk outlining his vision of how he saw the field progresing. It was the sort of passionate talk that had a high tally of buzzwords, but that lacked bankable details. Among the many ethereal ideas was one about how introducing maths into biology will position us to calculate quantities describing the human body and its behaviour. But he warned us that the body would be highly non-linear and as he said this, Navier-Stokes appeared in big letters on the screen behind him. Only it didn't say Navier-Stokes; it said Navier-Stalks.

This is an understandable mistake if you'd never read about the work, but I can't think of a nicer way to sum up the mismatch of knowledge between maths and biology.