Prandtl entered the Technische Hochschule Munich in 1894 and graduated with a Ph.D. under guidance of Professor August Foeppl in six years.

[4] His thesis was "On Tilting Phenomena, an Example of Unstable Elastic Equilibrium" (1900),[3] After university, Prandtl went to work in the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg to improve a suction device for shavings removal in the manufacturing process.

[3] On August 8, 1904, he delivered a groundbreaking paper, Über Flüssigkeitsbewegung bei sehr kleiner Reibung (On the Motion of Fluids in Very Little Friction), at the Third International Mathematics Congress in Heidelberg.

Several of his students made attempts at closed-form solutions, but failed, and in the end the approximation contained in his original paper remains in widespread use.

The effect of the paper was so great that Prandtl would succeed Hans Lorenz as director of the Institute for Technical Physics at the University of Göttingen later in the year.

In 1907, during his time at Göttingen, Prandtl was tasked with establishing a new facility for model studies of motorized airships called Motorluftschiffmodell-Versuchsanstalt (MVA), later the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) in 1919.

[9] The facility was focused on wind tunnel measurements of airship models with the goal of shapes with minimal air resistance.

During WWI, it was used as a large research establishment with many tasks including lift and drag on airfoils, aerodynamics of bombs, and cavitation on submarine propeller blades.

Blasius' dissertation explained what happened with the boundary layer when a flat plate comes in parallel contact with a uniform stream.

[12] Following earlier leads by Frederick Lanchester from 1902–1907, Prandtl worked with Albert Betz and Max Munk on the problem of a useful mathematical tool for examining lift from "real world" wings.

He also made specific additions to study cambered airfoils, like those on World War I aircraft, and published a simplified thin-airfoil theory for these designs.

Prandtl showed that an elliptical spanwise lift distribution the most efficient, giving the minimum induced drag for the given span.

In its first volume, ZAMM (Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics) stated that this meeting "for the first time, applied mathematics and mechanics was coming to its own to a larger extent"[17] This journal advertised the common goals of Prandtl, Theodore von Kármán, Richard von Mises, and Hans Reissner.

[9] On top of the foundation of ZAMM, the GAMM (International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics) was also formed due to the joint efforts of Prandtl and his peers.

[19] Regarding the professional rivalry that started between the two, Kármán commented: “I came to realize that ever since I had come to Aachen my old professor and I were in a kind of world competition.

Prandtl and von Kármán's work on the boundary was influential and adopted by aerodynamic and hydrodynamic experts around the world after WWI.

Günther Kempf showcased a number of experiments at the conference which confirmed many of the theoretical discoveries of von Kármán and Prandtl.

[21] After Hitler's rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich, Prandtl continued his role as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

During this period, the Nazi air ministry, led by Hermann Göring, often used Prandtl's international reputation as a scientist to promote Germany's scientific agenda.

The Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring is awarded by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt in his honor for outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering.