Flow in porous media: An attempt to outline Georges Matheron’s contributions

Abstract

During the last three decades of the 20th century, the application of a stochastic approach to flow in porous media has certainly been a very active research area, all over the world. Most of the eminent scientists working abroad in the domain (e.g., Dagan, Neuman, Gelhar, Gutjahr...) happened to visit the Ecole des Mines de Paris before 1980 and, more precisely, they spent some time in two small research labs that were located close to each other in Fontainebleau: the Laboratory for Mathematical Hydrogeology, and the Center for Geostatistics. All of them therefore had the opportunity to meet Georges Matheron who was, at that time, heading the Center for Geostatistics. Strangely enough, these visitors then perceived Matheron more as the inventor of kriging than as the author of “Elements pour une Théorie des Milieux Poreux”, a book he had written as early as 1967[41], i.e. only two years after his first book on random functions (RF) and on the estimation of regionalized variables.