ABSTRACT
T. Levi-Civita appears to have been the first to obtain the three-dimensional boundary layer equations in their full generality. A three-dimensional boundary layer problem may be reduced to a system of ordinary differential equations or of partial differential equations with two, rather than three, independent variables. Either possibility occurs only for a limited number of body configurations and implies the knowledge of the pressure distribution and of the blowing rate on the body surface. The difficulties encountered in dealing with three-dimensional flow problems have understandably created an interest in more tractable fluid motions; although the number of nonzero velocity components is three the number of independent variables is only two or occasionally even one. Three-dimensional stagnation-line boundary layer solutions for an impermeable body surface were obtained by Howarth for the incompressible flow and by E. Reshotko and L. Beckwith for the compressible uniform flow; a corresponding blowing problem was considered by D. R. Jeng and D. W. Williams.
