Continuum physics - expert advice

John Marko:

For fluid mechanics, you might like to look at
  1. Landau and Lifshitz Fluid Mechanics (first 10 or so chapters)
  2. Good book on turbulence by Batchelor (Cambridge)
  3. Good general book on fluids with lots of pictures by DJ Tritton
  4. Excellent short book on low reynolds number stuff and diffusion by Howard Berg, ``Random walks in biology''

Essential problems all students must work through once:

  1. Bernoulli effect (euler)
  2. Channel and pipe flow, laminar solution (they should see parabolic velocity profile, gives a good idea of what viscosity does, also shows importance of boundary conditions on flows)
  3. Linear drag coefficient of sphere, at least discuss cylinder result to show strong dependence on longest dimension only (viscous flow, linearized `stokes' hydrodynamics)
  4. Reynolds number and Kolmogorov picture of turbulence (see L&L for disturbingly rigorous-looking discussion of the latter topic)

I'm sure there are other important things but if I had to give an overview of hydrodynamics these would be the things I would harp on.

Dec 5 2002 - P. Cvitanovic'