J. Thomas Beale has been a Professor in the Duke University Mathematics Department for over twenty years. As an undergraduate he studied at Caltech and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1973 on problems in scattering theory under the direction of Ralph Phillips. Before moving to Duke, he was a member of the mathematics department at Tulane University.

Tom Beale's research has made many important contributions to studies of incompressible fluid dynamics, analysis of partial differential equations, and numerical methods. His 1984 article with Tosio Kato and Andrew Majda, Remarks on the breakdown of smooth solutions for the 3-D Euler equations (Comm. Math. Phys. 94 (1984), no. 1, 61--66) has been a very influential result in the study of singularities in fluid flows -- one of the remaining open problems in the Clay Institute's Millennium problems. He has more than 50 scientific publications with many collaborators and covering areas including water waves, vortex methods, quasi-geostrophic models of the atmosphere and oceans, numerical splitting methods, and recent work in computational methods for nearly singular integrals.

The FAN2010 conference brings together many of Tom's collaborators, colleagues, and other experts in a meeting spanning mathematical analysis of partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and numerical methods.