This article featured in the July 2018 edition of benchmark "Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning - Believe the Hype?"

In one of his many poems, Prof Brian Spalding described himself as “a person of unusual quality”. On Friday, April 20, 2018, at Imperial College London, a group of Prof Spalding’s, friends and colleagues joined with members of his family to celebrate his life and achievements. No one that attended the event was left in any doubt that not only was Brian Spalding a man of unusual quality but that he led a remarkable life that benefitted many. Brian Spalding was a poet, a linguist, a humanitarian, an inspirational teacher and a family man. However, he will be best remembered not only as a visionary that led the early development of Computational Fluid Dynamics, but also the man that turned CFD into a practical tool for engineers and almost single-handedly launched a commercial CFD market that is now worth billions of dollars. Almost all of the most successful commercial (and open source) CFD products on the market today can trace their origin back to work done by Brian Spalding’s Imperial College group in the 1960s and 70s.