Lloyd MacGregor Trefethen (March 15, 1919 – November 6, 2001) was an American expert in fluid dynamics known for his invention of the heat pipe and his research on the Coriolis effect and card shuffling.
[1] During World War II, poor eyesight made Trefethen ineligible for the Navy, so instead he signed up for the United States Merchant Marine.
[1] Although his initial plan of research was on cooling turbine blades, his eventual dissertation was Heat Transfer Properties of Liquid Metals, and his work sparked an ongoing interest in magnetohydrodynamics at Cambridge.
[5] On returning to the US, Trefethen took a managerial position at the National Science Foundation before joining Harvard University as an assistant professor of engineering in 1954.
[1] Trefethen's contributions to fluid mechanics also included widely reported experiments on the folklore claims that the Coriolis force can cause the vortex in a drain to rotate in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres.