The history of mechanics, and more particularly, the history of mechanics applied to constructions, constitutes a field of research that is relatively recent. This volume, together with the recent publication "Towards a History of Construction", is intended as an homage to the two eminent scholars who made a determinant contribution to the history of mechanics: Edoardo Benvenuto and Clifford Truesdell.
This book provides a brief introduction to rational continuum mechanics in a form suitable for students of engineering, mathematics and science. The presentation is tightly focused on the simplest case of the classical mechanics of nonpolar materials, leaving aside the effects of internal structure, temperature and electromagnetism, and excluding other mathematical models, such as statistical mechanics, relativistic mechanics and quantum mechanics. Within the limitations of the simplest mechanical theory, the author had provided a text that is largely self-contained. Though the book is primarily an introduction to continuum mechanics, the lure and attraction inherent in the subject may also recommend the book as a vehicle by which the student can obtain a broader appreciation of certain important methods and results from classical and modern analysis.
When all has been said, one important fact emerges: this book is a valuable compendium of results that every expert in hydrodynamics, gas dynamics, or dynamical meteorology will want to keep by … [their]side and refer to frequently." — Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society This unique graduate-level monograph offers a heavily mathematical treatment of the vorticity of fluids. The subject's wealth of applications extends to many areas of physics and engineering, and the book will also appeal to mathematically oriented historians of science. Starting with consideration of geometrical and kinematical preliminaries, the text advances to examinations of vorticity, the vorticity field, vorticity measures, and vorticity averages. Subsequent chapters explore Bernoullian theorems, convection and diffusion of vorticity, and circulation-preserving motions.
These lectures were first given during my tenure of a Walker Ames Visiting Professorship in the Department of Astronautics and Aeronautics at the University of Washington, November 2-12, 1964. I am grateful for the interest shown there and for the tranquil hospitality of Dr. JOHN BOLLARD and Dr. ELLIS DILL, which allowed me the leisure sufficient to write the first manuscript. I thank Dean ROBERT Roy and Dr. GEORGE BENTON for the unusual honor of an invitation to deliver a series of public lectures at my own university. Apart from the footnotes on pp. 49, 50, and 85, which have been added so as to answer questions allowed by the slower pace of silence, and the obviously necessary note on p. 106, the lectures of this second series are here printed as read, February 9-25, 1965. Thus I may call these, in imitation of a famous example, " Bal timore Lectures". Acknowledgment The first lecture is based largely upon my Bingham Medal Address of 1963, part of which it reproduces verbatim. The filth lecture may be regarded as a partial summary of my course on ergodic theory at the International School of Physics, Varenna, 1960. Much of the last lecture runs parallel to my article "The Modern Spirit in Applied Mathematics", ICSU Review of World Science, Volume 6, pp. 195-205 (1964), and some paragraphs are taken from my address to the Fourth U.S. National Congress of Applied Mechanics (1961).
Mon but n'a jamais be de m'occuper des ces matieres comme physicien, mais seulement comme /ogicien ... F. REECH, 1856 I do not think it possible to write the history of a science until that science itself shall have been understood, thanks to a clear, explicit, and decent logical structure. The exuberance of dim, involute, and undisciplined his torical essays upon classical thermodynamics reflects the confusion of the theory itself. Thermodynamics, despite its long history, has never had the benefit of a magisterial synthesis like that which EULER gave to hydro dynamics in 1757 or that which MAXWELL gave to electromagnetism in 1873; the expositions in the works of discovery in thermodynamics stand a pole apart from the pellucid directness of the notes in which CAUCHY presented his creation and development of the theory of elasticity from 1822 to 1845. Thermodynamics was born in obscurity and disorder, not to say confusion, and there the common presentations of it have remained. With this tractate I aim to provide a simple logical structure for the classical thermodynamics of homogeneous fluid bodies. Like any logical structure, it is only one of many possible ones. I think it is as simple and pretty as can be.
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