During the two and a half years I was at Ohio State (my junior and senior years of college), all of my physics and math classes were in the engineering building. During one of my physics classes our TA, who was a mechanical engineering grad student, brought up fluid dynamics and rowing and I swear, I have never paid more attention to a math/science-related discussion in my life.
As the rower in the video said, there’s a lot of engineering in rowing so if you’re good at math and science it’s definitely a major worth looking into. Once you graduate you could always translate it into a career with any one of the boat-making companies if you wanted to stick around the rowing world.
It is unfortunate there is so much bad science applied to rowing and so little interest from the rowing world in furthering analysis so the same coaching myths get trotted out again and again (anyone still told the oar is most efficient purpendicular to the boat?) The flow around a blade is highly complex and well beyond most curent numerical codes being unsteady, high seprated in parts, with free surface effects and that is before you get the boat hull and oar shaft in there or deal with the catch and finish. Anyone that claims to really understand it… doesn’t.
A nice overview by Carl Douglas: http://content.yudu.com/A2x3sf/Row360-001-Aug-2014/resources/96.htm
Some light bedside reading 😉 https://sites.google.com/site/surgingforwardrowing/publications-presentations
(I work for a CFD research company btw)
I agree. One of the things I legitimately *hate* about this sport is how unwilling people are to look beyond what’s already there and try/discover something new. Thanks for including those links, I’m definitely going to check them out!!