I write this letter to express my heartfelt appreciation to the Aeronauts and their families for sponsoring the Aeronauts Prize, of which I was this year’s recipient. Other awards were given on graduation day for best exam results and best final-year project, but after finding out more about my award, I felt as though I had won the best prize of all.

I first knew about the prize when a friend of mine asked what my prize was. I looked at him rather puzzled as I was then unaware I had won anything. He pointed out that, according to the programme, I had won the Aeronauts Prize. After already getting a first class degree this was definitely the icing on the cake.

After the ceremony I asked one of my lecturers about the prize, and sure enough I found out that the Aeronauts Prize is awarded for outstanding academic progress and significant contribution to the life of the University. She went on to say that the staff in the department had nominated me for the prize and so I would also like to thank them for my nomination.

I graduated with first class Honours in Computer Science and I am now researching towards a PhD in the field of visualization, which is all about using computer graphics to understand scientific experiments.

The Aeronauts will probably appreciate that it is far cheaper to ‘build’ a prototype aeroplane inside a computer and test it in a virtual wind tunnel than it is to develop a real prototype and test it in a real wind tunnel. As you can appreciate, the mathematics involved are phenomenal, and as people we simply cannot process pages of numbers very easily, but we can understand animated computer graphics of airflow over a wing, and this is only a small facet of my field of research.

In conclusion I won the Aeronauts’ Prize for being myself, which I think is the best kind of prize anybody can receive.

Thank you again Aeronauts.
James Alexander Osborne, BSc