David Hu: ‘People ask me the strangest questions’
The fluid dynamicist on playing chess, bringing science to the public, and the beauty in everyday life
My wife tells me I have more bikes than any person she knows. I have this fascination with timescales – when you’re on a bike, you see the world zooming past. It’s a totally different feeling than if you’re on the ground. Cycling speeds things up, but in a lot of my research, we slow things down.
I’ve got a son who’s nine, and a daughter who’s seven, and they’ve been inspirational to me. They’ve totally changed my lifestyle. I started as a professor when I was single, living in apartments… fast forward 10 years and I’m basically cleaning all the time, because they leave piles of breadcrumbs and hand marks everywhere. It’s influenced my research – we had a whole series of papers on cleaning. If I hadn’t changed my son’s diapers, I wouldn’t have discovered the law of urination.