MHD memes

Abstract

The celebration of Allan Kaufman's 80th birthday was an occasion to reflect on a career that has stimulated the mutual exchange of ideas (or memes in the terminology of Richard Dawkins) between many researchers. This paper will revisit a meme Allan encountered in his early career in magnetohydrodynamics, the continuation of a magnetohydrodynamic mode through a singularity, and will also mention other problems where Allan's work has had a powerful cross-fertilizing effect in plasma physics and other areas of physics and mathematics. To resolve the continuation problem we regularize the Newcomb equation, solve it in terms of Legendre functions of imaginary argument, and define the small weak solutions of the Newcomb equation as generalized functions in the manner of Lighthill, i.e. via a limiting sequence of analytic functions that connect smoothly across the singularity. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.