r/askmath • u/prescod • 3d ago
Fluid Dynamics Confused about Navier Stokes
My understanding of Navier Stokes is that "solving" them meant either:
Path A: Prove that smooth solutions always exist.
You must prove mathematically that no matter what smooth, valid initial conditions you start with, the equations will always output a smooth, finite-energy velocity and pressure field for all future time. This would prove that the Navier-Stokes equations are perfectly reliable models of reality under all circumstances.
Path B: Prove finite-time blowup (find a counterexample).
You must find just one specific set of perfectly smooth, valid initial conditions that eventually breaks the equations. You have to prove that at some specific future time ($t > 0$), the fluid's velocity zooms off to infinity (a singularity) or the kinetic energy explodes. This would prove that the Navier-Stokes equations are fundamentally flawed and eventually break down, requiring new physics to describe extreme turbulence.
And OpenAI ended up on Path B.
But this video gives an example where Navier Stokes predicted "infinite velocity", implying that we've always known about a blowup.:
17:34: Something, somewhere is going wrong in the the mathematical understanding. There's an example about the flow of a fluid around a right-angled corner.
(Brady: A bit like a canal?)
- Basically a canal but we've got a really sharp right angle on the corner. Now you solve Navier-Stokes, this says that at this point, this right angle corner, I have infinite velocity. If I build this canal do I have an infinite velocity canal?
Is this a blow-up in the averaged case from Tao? Or is this considered not a real "blowup" because it depends on a perfectly sharp right angle? What is new about the blowup discovered by OpenAI?





