John R. Womersley

[3] In 1937, with war looming, he joined the armaments research department at Woolwich as a scientific officer, and worked on using statistical techniques applied to ballistics and ammunition proofing.

In 1942, after the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed assistant director of scientific research at the Ministry of Supply and asked to set up and head the Advisory Service on Statistical Methods (later known as SR17).

[3][12][13] He himself left the project in 1950, before the prototype pilot ACE was completed, to join the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM), a forerunner of International Computers Limited (ICL).

[15] In 1954 Womersley left BTM and joined a research team, led by Donald McDonald at St Bartholomew's Hospital, who were studying blood flow in arteries.

[16] Whatever the reason, this move led to a new and highly productive period in his research, as he applied mathematical and computational techniques to the analysis of blood flow and hemodynamics.

Most notably in 1955 he published an article[17] which described a dimensionless parameter (α) which characterised the nature of unsteady flow;[18][19] subsequently this has been called the Womersley number.

[18] In July 1955, as planned, he moved to WADC to take a post as acting chief of the Analysis Section, System Dynamics Branch Aeronautical Research Laboratory.

[3] His 1957 monograph on 'An elastic tube theory of pulse transmission and oscillatory flow in mammalian arteries' is widely regarded as a major influence in the field.