Guillaume van Baalen Stationary Solutions of the Navier-Stokes Equations in a Half-Plane Down-Stream of an Object: Universality of the Wake (637K, postscript) ABSTRACT. We consider stationary solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for an exterior domain in two dimensions. We prove that asymptotically in the down--stream direction, the leading order deviation from the constant flow is universal, i.e. independent of the details of the domain. To get this result, we show that the (elliptic) Navier-Stokes equations can be interpreted as a dynamical system, the down-stream direction playing the role of time, which shares some aspects with a parabolic PDE.