Customer Reviews

Approximating Perfection: A Mathematician's Journey into the World of Mechanics

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As a student of physics, I took up this book to brush up on some classical mechanics before delving back into analytical mechanics. I was pleasantly surprised in a couple of ways, one, at how well the authors explain the material, albeit on occasion they do skip a step or two; second, it was not a book on physics proper but on mechanical engineering. That is not a fault though, in a sense it does a better job than the purely physics treatment other books take and you get to learn neat little things like the stress and strain tensors.
So, if you want to deepen your understanding of mechanics, read this book before you hit the textbooks.
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College-level readers who enjoy thinking about how Nature can be described using math will find Leonid Lebedev and Michael Cloud's Approximating Perfection: A Mathematician's Journey Into The World Of Mechanics, a fine survey of applied mechanics and its lighter side. Formal engineering courses often bypass such topics as how models remain imperfect and under-developed: Approximating Perfection surveys these and other issues, emphasizing underlying logic and parallels between mechanics and math.