Philip L. Roe

Philip L. Roe (4 May 1938 – 26 April 2026) was an English dynamicist who was Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is known for his work in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics. Roe made fundamental contributions to the development of high-resolution schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. Roe developed approximate Riemann solver called Roe solver for compressible flows with shocks.

Life and career After completing his education at Cambridge University, United Kingdom, Roe worked for the Royal Aircraft Establishment from 1962 to 1984. Initially he worked in the field of missile aerodynamics and later shifted to CFD and devised the Roe solver for numerical computation of compressible flows with shocks. He published this work in the seminal paper titled "Approximate Riemann solvers, parameter vectors, and difference schemes" which appeared in the Journal of Computational Physics in 1981.

Roe died on 26 April 2026, at the age of 87.

Contributions Roe's most celebrated contribution is the development of the Roe solver, an approximate Riemann solver for the numerical computation of compressible flows with shocks, introduced in his 1981 paper in the Journal of Computational Physics.

Roe was also a pioneer of upwind-differencing methods for CFD, contributing to a class of methods that remain dominant for problems in fluid mechanics and related fields. He was one of the originators of the waverider concept for hypersonic flight, in which a vehicle is specifically designed so as to ride atop the shock waves generated by its own leading edges. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Physics from 1992 to 1994, and as William Penney Visiting Professor at Cambridge University from 2008 to 2016. He was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in 1996. In 2015, he received the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award, which is presented annually for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the behaviour of liquids and gases in motion as related to aeronautics and astronautics.

Selected publications