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Mathematics Applied to Continuum Mechanics

Lee A. Segel
Publisher: 
SIAM
Publication Date: 
2007
Number of Pages: 
590
Format: 
Paperback
Series: 
Classics in Applied Mathematics 52
Price: 
85.00
ISBN: 
9780898716207
Category: 
Monograph
BLL Rating: 

The Basic Library List Committee suggests that undergraduate mathematics libraries consider this book for acquisition.

[Reviewed by
Fernando Q. Gouvêa
, on
09/29/2007
]

This is a reprint, in SIAM's Classics in Applied Mathematics series, of a book first published by Macmillan in 1977. Thomas R. Savage, in a Telegraphic Review published in the March 1978 issue of the The American Mathematical Monthly (Vol. 85, No. 3, p. 220) described the book as:

An introduction to continuum models of fluid flow and solid deformation. Four main parts: tensor algebra and calculus; continuum mechanics of viscous fluids and elasticity; water waves; variational methods and extremum problems. Section on water waves leads the reader to the research frontiers. An excellent text for a second course in applied mathematics.

In his introduction to the SIAM reprint, Donald Drew explains that the book was indeed intended (and used, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) for such a second course, but that it was not as successful as Segel's earlier Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences, in part because of its more specialized topic. Still, Drew argues that "the student who uses this book to add understanding to a rigorous text will reach a transcendent appreciation of the science of continuum mechanics."


Fernando Q. Gouvêa is the editor of MAA Reviews.