Customer Reviews

Waves in Fluids (Cambridge Mathematical Library)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, althought an it's an old one, is a masterpiece.
It covers all one needs to know in order to study wave generation and propagation in fluids. The level of reading is not exactly easy. Ever since the first page, the reader is assumed to have some familiarity with the subject. It MAY appear that it is an introductory book, but it is not. The level of math understanding required to read this book is high. Everything is explained in a coincise form, but sometimes it happens that every line contains a concept, and this will slow down the speed of reading seriously...
Anyway: I like this book, and if you're not a novell, buy it.

This book is a kind of a book that is seldom used as a text in universities, but everybody in the fields of math, physics, and engineering, has once read. The most valuable topic in this book would be the theory of aeroacoustics which is developed by the auther. Everything is fundamental, but you can learn a great deal about waves which you cannot from other books. This book is a prerequisite to anyone who wants to talk about waves in fluids.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of scientists and engineers who are studying wave motion in fluids in a variety of terrestrial applications. This book is intended to be a reference for an advanced graduate student or researcher and assumes a considerable amount of background knowledge. I'd say that if you aren't comfortable with most of the material in Landau and Lifschitz (Fluid Mechanics, 2nd ed.), much of this book will be incomprehensible. I only give this four stars for two reasons. First, I found this book to be tough going. My feeling is that Lighthill's style just doesn't suit me so maybe this is a personal, not general, complaint, but I found that he does not explain things well and often obsfuscates key points. Second, I think that the first two chapters (on sound waves and one dimensional waves in fluids) are woefully inadequate. The real meat of this book is in the second two chapters (water waves and internal waves) and definitely worth the price of the book if that is your interest, but the basics of the subject were not tied together well (or clearly) in the first two chapters. This is still an introductory book in some sense (`introductory' to an advanced topic, that is). Finally, be warned that this book deals mostly with terrestrial, subsonic applications (waves in the ocean, blood flow in capallaries, etc.). I approached this book from an astrophysics perspective (i.e. viscous, compressible flows mostly) and found the book less useful.

This is a reissue of Lighthill's original book by the same name. It is simply reissued into the Cambridge Mathematical Library Series. To see the publication documentation page, search the contents of the book using the keyword "published", then select the entry labeled "from Front Matter".