Abstract
A necessary and sufficient condition for linear stability of inviscid parallel shear flow is formulated by a novel variational method, where the velocity profile is assumed to be monotonic and analytic. Unstable eigenvalues of the Rayleigh equation are shown to be associated with positive eigenvalues of a certain selfadjoint operator. The stability is therefore simply determined by maximizing a quadratic form, which is theoretically and numerically more tractable than directly solving the Rayleigh equation. This variational approach is based on the Hamiltonian nature of the inviscid fluid and will be applicable to other hydrodynamic stability problems.
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