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James Lighthill died on 17 July 1998, at the end of a ten-hour swim round the
Channel Island of Sark. He had earlier, at age 49, been the first person ever to do
this, and he was carrying out the swim for the seventh time when the exertion revealed
a mitral valve weakness which had never been diagnosed, and which led to his sudden
death in the water. The swim was one of many long ‘adventure swims’ which Lighthill
liked to take, all characterized by strong tidal currents and often heavy seas. And
Lighthill took much pleasure through exercising his comprehensive understanding of
fluid mechanics first in preparing for them through study of local conditions and then
in adapting his performance when, as often, he found that in practice the currents
were not as charted and, in fact, often more treacherous.
Many obituary notices have already appeared in the national press in the UK and
USA, and now in the newsletters and journals of learned societies; and extensive
conspectuses of Lighthill's contributions to fluid mechanics and applied mathematics,
and to science generally and to the administration of science, will be published in
Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics (2000), and in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of
the Royal Society (2000). The reader will learn, from those accounts, of the unique
range and depth of Lighthill's contributions; and virtually all readers should expect
to be surprised and impressed to read of facets of Lighthill's work of which they were
previously totally unaware.
