The books once interested me

coolboy

学习小能手_二流 发表于 2014-12-8 15:46
i saw your name in CFD-online.

It is inappropriate or not a good idea to guess, reveal or discuss other's true identity on bbs.

coolboy

曾庆存，1974：大气红外遥测原理，科学出版社。（missing or misplaced from my bookshelves)。
曾庆存，1979：数值天气预报的数学物理基础，第一卷，543页，科学出版社。

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Scientists, especially the good ones, often have rivals or competitors. Here, I am using “rivals” or “competitors” in a neutral sense for people often make greater progresses in a competent environment.

Based on what I heard on the street, Qing-cun Zeng (曾庆存) also had many rivals in scientific research. One group/category of those rivals belongs to the people who worked in different styles from Zeng. There have been endless debates everywhere including on this bbs on “science” (理科) versus “engineering” (工科) in terms of which field is more important in what sense, etc. I started my career in (mechanical) “engineering” and switched to (atmospheric) “science” major at the later stage, so I somehow understand both fields to certain extent. I personally like “science” more than “engineering” though I do understand that the society needs both “science” and “engineering” equally. I mentioned above that Zeng’s root science major was mathematics. As a result, his writings were highly mathematical. At the time his “数值天气预报的数学物理基础 (1979)” was published, it was said that even professors had great difficulty to understand his book. There were only very few people buying his book for the book was too difficult to understand (coolboy bought a copy, costing me 4.50 yuan at the time, my monthly salary was only 14 yuan three years before) so that Zeng had to spend his own money to buy several hundred copies of the book to distribute to others (not to coolboy) as free gifts. People were criticizing his book by saying “...so you proved the existence, uniqueness and stability of the solutions to the fluid equations in your book, but how can we understand it and use it to improve our weather forecast? I see little usage of the book.....”.

Another kind of rivals was about people’s educational background that had Chinese characteristics at the time. At the old times, say, 1950s-1960s, it was a big thing, a huge event for someone to pass a statewide exam to get into university (千军万马争过独木桥，十年寒窗苦，鲤鱼跳龙门) or even better and also much harder to go abroad to study. Zeng was one example in this category, who entered a top university in China and then went to former Soviet Union to study, all through the formal and fair competition via various exams. At that time, there were also people who got into top universities and even went abroad to study not through an open and fair competition but through some kind of special arrangement. Again, based on what I heard on the street, sometimes, the reasons for those special arrangements were strange: “This young guy looks nice and smart. If I create a good condition or a good environment for him to study, including sending him abroad, he will become a good scientist to make a great contribution to the society.” But what is the fairness to many other nice and young guys who failed passing 独木桥 even though they still had 十年寒窗苦? At the time, the people in Zeng’s camp of experiencing and passing formal and fair competitions would say: well, look at Zeng whose major was in 数值天气预报 but was assigned to work on the problems in radiation field in the past few years, and yet he wrote a book on 大气红外遥测原理 while working in your guys’ research field. Where is the good scientist or the good stuff a good scientist would produce? Well, a few years later, the following book was published:

周秀骥 等 编著，1982：大气微波辐射及遥感原理，178页，科学出版社。

coolboy

I introduced three books in the following scientific discussion with professor Yu-Chi "Larry" Ho (何毓琦) on sciencenet (科学网). However, the original discussion had been deleted. In fact, all my posts on sciencenet had been deleted or disappeared. Many of my writings on sciencenet were serious and scientifically valuable, costing me significant amount of time to compose as well. Fortunately, this particular discussion was posted again on the LASG forum. The following post is therefore copied from the LASG forum:

On finding an ideal partner for life [coolboy]
http://bbs.lasg.ac.cn/bbs/thread-45026-1-3.html

coolboy

On finding an ideal partner for life [coolboy]
http://bbs.lasg.ac.cn/bbs/thread-45026-1-3.html

The title of this essay “On finding an ideal partner for life” is the subtitle of a recent blog essay by professor Ho (何毓琦):

Q&A with Tsinghua Students (III) - On Finding An Ideal Partner For Life
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-276944.html

Professor Ho described this important topic from the perspective of “decision and control” and included two major components in his descriptions: (1) a task of stochastic optimization in searching for a partner to get married and (2) a life-long process of adaptation and learning to have fun while getting there (i.e., to finally have an ideal partner).

I happen to be also interested in this subject and have also been spending certain time on researching it. So, I made some comments on his blog to expand his central ideas in a little bit more detail. Hopefully, my explanations may help more readers to “strive towards the optimum through disagreements, quarrels, compromises, understanding, joy, discovery, and ultimate fulfillment”, as professor Ho hoped for.

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I completely agree with professor Ho’s view on this matter. For those who want to learn more on the technical details about the second aspect of professor Ho’s view of “adaptation and learning”, please read the discussions on the following two blog articles:

Go, get married, now! [coolboy]
http://bulo.hujiang.com/diary/531363/

Is love powerful? [coolboy]
http://bulo.hujiang.com/diary/530454/

Through an “adaptation and learning” process, it is well said that “getting there is all the fun”. However, most people still hope to start an adaptation and learning process from a good initial condition. Hence, a natural question one wonders would be: can one or how can one put some efforts in the “stochastic optimization” of finding a good life partner before the marriage so that one would have a good initial condition to start the adaptation and learning process?

One plausible solution to this important and practical problem associated with the “stochastic optimization” was given in one of my previous comments and I think it is worth copying here again:

On Optimal Control
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-209522.html
[3]Coolboy:【When there exists “uncertainty” in a system and one has to “fly with maximum speed in the direction of current position and B”, one had better to realize that it is not worthwhile spending great efforts on evaluating local gradient at each step accurately when the “current position” is still close to A and far away from B. If one evaluates the early stage gradient with little accuracy but great efficiency, and gradually increases its accuracy as the iteration solution approaches B, it is possible to avoid the notorious exponential growth problem for the multivariable cost functions.】

In brief, it says that an efficient and appropriate way of performing “stochastic optimization” is to gradually increase the efforts of searching at each step so that “THE optimal solution on expected or average value” can be achieved with the limited or a given resource. Implied in this kind of searching processes is that people often get more experienced when they repeat similar processes.

The next question is: what is or do we have a recipe/algorithm for optimal searching? The answer to this question has also been given in another comment of mine on professor Ho's blog:

Warren Buffett’s Ten Rules for Success
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-38150.html
[4]Coolboy:【When we were in college, we learnt a lesson in our English class entitled “How to Study” that introduced an SQ3R strategy on how to study efficiently: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Revise. This SQ3R strategy can also be applied to many other things including how to find a good girlfriend for a boy or how to find a good boyfriend for a girl. For example, you first go through a “survey” process by excluding those who are too old or too young, too this or too that. Then you “question”, casually asking “are you from North or South?” “What color do you like most?” “Do you like seafood or can you cook a nice fish dish?” etc. The measure of how much you can “read” her mind or vice versa should give you an idea of how much commonality you two have. You then review how much you are able to “recite” what you have told her in previous conversation(s), which should give you an objective measure of how much you are actually close to her. If you find the overall score too low after certain period, then you “revise” it to switch to a different one.】

So far, all the discussions have been limited to a qualitative level though both professor Ho and I have used some scientific terminologies. Since many readers of this blog are scientists, it is also worthwhile pointing to the direction of how to implement the above ideas in a precise or quantitative way. I put forward a similar argument in a recent discussion on a hot topic of global warming:

关于全球气候变暖
http://bbs.lasg.ac.cn/bbs/thread-42150-3-1.html
Coolboy:【So far, we have being talking about hydrological cycle and precipitation extremes in a quantitative or a scientific way in which numbers or logical reasoning or facts are the most important. In the early stage of the discussion, we have also mentioned the critical difference between scientific research and philosophical arguments. Therefore, it might be interesting or solely for the purpose of comparison to see a few pieces of writings on hydrological cycle and precipitation extremes in a qualitative manner or from a philosophical point of view. 】

Here, I think one very useful reference that gives great details on modern “stochastic optimization” is the following book:

Spall, J. C., 2003: Introduction to Stochastic Search and Optimization: Estimation, Simulation, and Control.  John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 595 pp.

Chapter 7 of the above book contains the algorithm of implementing the original idea that “evaluates the early stage gradient with little accuracy but great efficiency, and gradually increases its accuracy as the iteration solution approaches B.”

Professor Ho mentioned Kalman filter in his replies to my above comments. In terms of the relative importance of determinant versus randomness, we probably can divide the stochastic optimization problems into two categories: (1) those where the determinate processes are dominant with small modifications coming from randomness and (2) those we know little about precise laws governing their changes due to randomness that makes the major contributions to system variations. One well-known example in the first category is the change and control of the state of a spacecraft (or any flying object) where stochastic uncertainties only slightly modify the known dynamical system. In this category, the Kalman filter is always the best method/approach to solve the stochastic optimization problems BECAUSE the Kalman filter fully utilizes the available knowledge/resource of the determinate dynamical system. On the other hand, if one likes to optimize a network of traffic flows by appropriately setting the timings of the traffic lights at all the interactions there is hardly any determinate law that will tell us, as a first order approximation, how the flow will evolve with time. In this case, the gradient needs to be evaluated entirely by the stochastic approximations.

An introductory essay on Kalman filter is given below:

A physicist’s view on Kalman filter  [coolboy]
http://bulo.hujiang.com/diary/530266/


何毓琦回复：

I do not wish to start a complete discussion of stochastic optimization here. But it should be pointed out that so far your comments apply only to problems involving continuous variables where gradient and other local improvement ideas apply. There is a whole new category of stochastic optimization problems involving discrete or categorical variables where general search and very different methodology must be used.

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coolboy回复：

Well, well, I believe I learnt at least one optimization technique for discrete or categorical variables when I was still in high school many years ago. Of course, this was not because I was somehow special at that time. There were many, many Chinese good high school students, general technicians or even ordinary workers who learnt the same technique around the same time. This was all because a great and well-known Chinese mathematician Hua, Luogeng (华罗庚) who spent great efforts on popularizing the optimization methods (优选法) in China in the special period of the so-called Great Culture Revolution. I have only a few Chinese books on my bookshelves but one of those happens to be a book I read very seriously right after its publication and when I was truly a cool boy:

《正交试验法》编写组，1976：正交试验法。国防工业出版社，210页，定价：0.65元。

The method of orthogonal designs was also briefly introduced in Chapter 17 in the above mentioned Spall’s (2003) book. One good thing about Spall’s book is that it “focuses on methods that have a solid theoretical foundation and that have a track record of effectiveness in a broad range of practical applications.” A more recent book on orthogonal designs is:

方开泰，马长兴，2001：正交与均匀试验设计。科学出版社，248页，定价：18.00元，

in which the authors indicated that there exists an equivalence between orthogonal designs and D-Optimality.

I came to USA as a graduate student many years ago and immediately met some Chinese visiting scholars (majoring in geology and fishery) who presented their researches to their American colleagues. They were very surprised that none of the Americans knew the 优选法 (optimization methods) that were so popular in China and almost everyone in China knew it. I recalled that at the old time though people always associated 华罗庚 with 优选法 but people only said 华罗庚推广优选法 and hardly anyone had said 华罗庚发明优选法. Later, I discovered that the field had a different name in English for this special field of the optimization methods (优选法): Experimental Designs.

coolboy

So, professor Ho’s (何毓琦) research field has been in automatic control. But what is it? Is it an “engineering” or a “science” field? Long, long time ago, I thought automatic control was part of the mechanical engineering for engineers to figure out how to build assembly lines by various machines or devices. I guess I was not alone to have such a naive thought. For example, it appeared that someone on this forum had a similar thought about the field:

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[讨论]用非标准分析方法封闭湍流方程（吴峰） [33楼]
http://www.cfluid.com/thread-45356-3-2.html

通流：

最近20年，搞控制的人都想试一下流动控制。其中成功的例子不多。这里的原因大概是非线性占大头。剑桥的一位能够通过抑制小的波动，把一层水稳定在一个容器的顶部不掉下来。

顺便问一句，Ho是哈佛（现在在清华）的何毓琦吗？
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Later, and much later, I once attended a prestigious conference on automatic control and served as a session chair for the conference. I noted that the research field of automatic control was highly mathematical with many research papers just proving mathematical theorems rather than only showing a few numerical examples to illustrate/guess a viewpoint. I have published many science papers but only one of those was in the field of automatic control. That paper was the most mathematical one.

coolboy

Though I once confused “assembly lines” with “automatic control”, luckily, I have never confused “assembly lines” (流水线) with “streamlines” (流线). However, these two terminologies can easily be confused by some lousy researchers or layman managers: “Tom designed one assembly line whereas Mike drew ten streamlines, thus Mike is better than Tom.”(张三设计了一条流水线，李四画了十条流线，李四当然比张三厉害多了。) Purely based on superficial or literal meanings of certain words some lousy researchers can conduct serious scientific research to publish papers and books. I once mentioned one such example in my post in which someone can publish books purely based on a misunderstanding of “global warming” as “warming everywhere all the time” whereas in fact “global warming” means “increase of global mean surface temperature”:

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关于全球气候变暖
http://bbs.lasg.ac.cn/bbs/thread-42150-1-2.html
coolboy:
“全球气候变暖或全球气温上升是指近地面低层大气的全球气温上升。高层大气是降温，从而整体系统的内能不变。这是因为地球整体系统在短时间内接收到的太阳辐射能基本不变或不需要变。大气中增加的二氧化碳同时增加了向下和向上的红外辐射。向下的辐射能增加了地面的温度而向上的辐射增加了高层大气的冷却率而使之 降温。......”
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I once also described another example of how a layman manager would elegantly give an answer to a scientific question:

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问：云雨如何产生雷电？
答：云雨的时候若男女之间具有共同的理想和人生目标，则云雨就能产生爱情。爱情的力量是无穷的。在“天人合一”的中国古代哲学思想以及“人体科学”这一现代创新思想的的启发下，这无穷的爱情之魅力就能转化为巨大的自然力，这雷电也就随之而生了。
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One way to avoid the embarrassments caused by the lack or the ignorance of background knowledge to many layman managers is to eliminate all the science terminologies in the process of management and to only use numbers as indicators to judge a scientist’s aptitude. I guess the most popular indicator is the so-callled SCI – Science Citation Index. One does not have to know the specific capability of a scientist, does not have to know the details (“assembly lines” or “streamlines”?), the titles, the abstracts (making love or cloud & rain?), the conclusions, etc of the scientific papers published by a scientist. As long as you tell me his/her SCI, I can immediately tell you how good this particular scientist is. In addition to SCI, people may also use H-index, E-index, etc to do all kinds of judgement soly based on numbers but not the actual contents.

I sometimes receive unsolicited resumes from graduate students or fresh PhD’s, asking whether I would be able to offer postdoctoral positions in my institute. I received more enquiries from pure math major students than students from other majors. I know for sure that my scientific research in math is not as good as in other majors. Thus, the number of those enquiries is misleading.

coolboy

Though “automatic control” does not build “assembly lines”, somehow control theory, at least on its applications, should be related to engineering. I once came across the following textbook:

Noton, M., 1972: Modern Control Engineering. Pergamon Press Inc., New York, 277 pp.

By going through the contents of the book:

Chapter 1 State Representation of Dynamical System
Chapter 2 Finite Dimensional Optimization
Chapter 3 Infinite Dimensional Optimization
Chapter 4 Dynamic Programming
Chapter 5 Introductory Stochastic Estimation and Control
Chapter 6 Actual and Potential Applications
Chapter 7 Appendices
Chapter 8 Supplements --- Introduction to Matrices and State Variables

one may be able to get a general idea that “Control Engineering” is about optimization. This book interested me due to one particular figure in the book. The book was full of equations but not many figures. However, I found one figure very interesting because it looked very similar to the figures I encounted many years before when I was in high school. I recalled the Chinese mathematician Hua, Luogeng (华罗庚) who once greatly encouraged good mathematicians to write popular math booklets for high school students. I came across several of those booklets in my high school library and remembered one of those was called “线性规划”. The figure shown in Section 2.6 (Linear Programming) of the above book looked very much like many figures shown in that popular math booklet as I recalled. Thus, I knew that 线性规划 can be considered part of the “Control Engineering”.

coolboy

Different authors may have different flavors/styles in writing basic textbooks. The following textbook on control theory emphasizes the treatment of the “feedback” of a dynamical system:

Brogan, W. L., 1985: Modern Control Theory. Second Edition. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 509 pp.

The term “feedback” and its physical significance are also the central theme in the currently hot field of “global climate changes”. Though both the idea and the term of “feedback” were originally borrowed from the field of control theory, there were apparently certain noticeable differences about their meanings in their respective fields. I had a discussion with professor Yu-Chi Ho (何毓琦) about this issue on the sciencenet (科学网). Again, my writings carrying science discussions on sciencenet have all been deleted or disappeared. Fortunately, this particular writing was posted again on the LASG forum. The following statements are therefore excerpted from the LASG forum:

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关于全球气候变暖  [10楼]
http://bbs.lasg.ac.cn/bbs/thread-42150-1-1.html

coolboy (2009-1-13 14:43:40):
“I noted that the idea/concept of feedback in control as described above is slightly different from the feedback in physics as I am aware of. The “feedback” in control refers to the effect of the system output at the time step t1 on the system at the next time step t2. On the other hand, the feedback in physics often refers to the nonlinear coupling among different processes at the same time step. Say, factor A causes a direct change in the system output. The direct change induced by A may cause additional changes in another system parameter B, which may lead to an additional change in the system output. This additional change induced by B that in turn is caused by the change in the system output is called feedback.”
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I believe one potentially important reason for such a noticeable difference in the concept of “feedback” between two groups of researchers may be due to the fact that they often think in different spaces. Researchers in the field of automatic control and electric engineering usually think feedback problems in s-space or in both s- and t-spaces whereas researchers in the field of global climate changes only think the feedback problems in t-space. The nonlocal convolution in t-space is only a local product in s-space, and vice versa.

coolboy

I recall at one time I read either a book review or an essay by a physicist who criticized how philosophers developed their new theories on (or alternative explanations to) the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics were two most influential physics theories in the 20th century for the new theories fundamentally changed the ways people were thinking at the time in addition to many important applications. To help the general public or the ordinary people to understand the new concepts and new theories, some physicists introduced the new theories in layman’s language without mathematical equations. Those popularized explanations in layman’s language helped many more people to learn and to understand some basic new ideas or concepts of the new theories but they were certainly incomplete and, in some cases, misleading. The cases that physicist was criticizing were that some philosophers thought that by reading those popular booklets or articles on relativity and quantum mechanics they understood the new theories very well and were able to criticize the existing theories and propose new or alternative theories to fix the “problems” (but most likely were the misunderstandings of those philosophers) in the existing theories, of course, from the philosophical viewpoints (without math equations). Clearly, the physicist was criticizing the shallowness of the philosophers of doing the scientific research from the quantitative or physical point of view.

Here, I recalled and introduced the above example because I felt that there were certain similarities between people who studied “feedbacks” in global climate changes and those philosophers. Specifically, in the above mentioned textbook by Brogan (1987), the author introduced the concept of “feedback” or the closed-loop control by the simplest single-input, single-output feedback system in the first two chapters. The formal multi-input, multi-output feedback systems were introduced in chapter 16 after extensive introductions of many chapters on matrix analysis theory. It appears that in the field of global climate changes, the majority (or many) of researches associated with the feedback analysis in all these (tens) years have been based on the prototype model in the control theory of the simplest (conceptual) single-input, single-output feedback system.

In this particular example or based on the textbook by Brogan (1987), a bridge from a simple concept or a prototype model to a formal, rigorous and comprehensive theory is the matrix analysis. In my opinion, this is also true in many applied math fields. One good reference book on the matrix analysis is given by:

Horn, R. A., and C. R. Johnson, 1985: Matrix Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 561 pp.

In addition, a reference book on matrix computations is given by:

Golub, G. H., and C. F. van Loan, 1989: Matrix Computations. Second Edition. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, 642 pp.

coolboy

While describing a vector (矢量) being a quantity that had both the magnitude and direction, my middle school math teacher also mentioned a word “tensor” (张量), which was a much more complicated quantity than a vector. I did not understand the meaning of “tensor” until very late. I also recalled my college professor who taught us “Fuild Mechanics” once saying: the “Fluid Mechanics” textbook by Pei-Yuan Chou (周培源) was a difficult one because it used tensor analysis a lot (I have never seen Chou’s book). The following textbook on tensor analysis was a popular one in the field of fluid mechanics for a long time:

Flugge, W., 1972: Tensor Analysis and Continuum Mechanics. Springer-Verlag, New York, 207 pp.

While reading the above textbook, I also learnt an interesting fact that the so-called “elastic coefficient” (弹性系数, a term known to ordinary people) was a tensor of fourth order and could have 36 different components. I told this fact to others in more than one occasion to show my coolness.

coolboy

Because Pei-Yuan Chou (周培源) once studied the general theory of relativity under the guidance of Albert Einstein, it was not surprised that he was familiar with tensor analysis and would use it extensively in his work if needed. Tensor analysis is a required basic tool for physicists to seriously study relativity theory. For example, in the following two popular textbooks where the general theory of relativity was systematically introduced, the authors first had to spend several sections on introducing the basic math tool of tensor analysis:

Landau, L. D., and E. M. Lifshitz, 1975: Course of Theoretical Physics. Vol. 2: The Classical Theory of Fields. Fourth Edition. Pergamon Press, New York, 402 pp.

Peebles, P. J. E., 1993: Principles of Physical Cosmology. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 718 pp.

I once told a story of how some people who understood neither tensor analysis nor calculus would seriously criticize Albert Einstein’ general theory of relativity:

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[讨论]伯努利方程是能量方程还是动量方程？ [244楼]
http://www.cfluid.com/thread-114265-17-1.html
coolboy:
......举一个极端的例子，当年文革中有开大会批判爱因斯坦相对论的。其中有一位造反派领导在审阅批判稿时就说：你看你看，这么不小心，你连这8都写不好，都躺下来了，没有一点正气。假若你要是懂相对论的话，你就可以用比较肯定的口气说，那造反派领导连“无穷”都不知，还批爱因斯坦的相对论呢，纯粹是在瞎扯。对那些真懂相对论的人们来说，他们是不会认为这一比较肯定的批评口气去否定他人是自以为高别人一等地在教训他人。
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tianhelu

waiting for  u

coolboy

Landau and Lifshitz’s “Course of Theoretical Physics” has ten volumes. The above mentioned volume 2 on the general relativity theory was one of the two most popular textbooks in physics and applied math fields that were often used as major reference books in classes. The other one was volume 1 on classic mechanics:

Landau, L. D., and E. M. Lifshitz, 1976: Course of Theoretical Physics. Vol. 1: Mechanics. Third Edition. Pergamon Press, New York, 169 pp.

Among the rest of the ten volumes, the following three textbooks were also very well known and were often used as secondary references for physics and applied math classes:

Landau, L. D., and E. M. Lifshitz, 1977: Course of Theoretical Physics. Vol. 3: Quantum Mechanics (Non-relativistic Theory). Third Edition. Pergamon Press, New York, 673 pp.

Landau, L. D., and E. M. Lifshitz, 1980: Course of Theoretical Physics. Vol. 5: Statistical Physics. Third Edition, Part 1. Pergamon Press, New York, 544 pp.

Landau, L. D., and E. M. Lifshitz, 1987: Course of Theoretical Physics. Vol. 6: Fluid Mechanics. Second Edition. Pergamon Press, New York, 539 pp.

The reason that those books were often used as “secondary” but not the “major” references was that there were textbooks that were even better or much better than Landau’s textbooks in terms of scope and style. For example, in the field of fluid mechanics in general, the best textbook has been the one by G. K. Batchelor:

Batchelor, G. K., 1967: An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 615 pp

I once described the historical significance of Batchelor’s textbook in sciencenet [again, all my posts on sciencenet had been deleted]:

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少读语录，多读原著，精读名著。
[coolboy, 2009-8-7]
王振东教授在回忆大学毕业不久师从马沣先生进修流体力学以及关于他写作“野渡无人舟自横”的科普文章时提到了Milne-Thomson的流体力学名著：“我每星期去他家两次，主要学习Milne-Thomson的名著Theoretical Hydrodynamics。” [Ref.1]

在Milne-Thomson之前的流体力学经典名著是Lamb的Hydrodynamics。在Milne-Thomson之后流体力学的经典名著则是Batchelor的An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics。这两本书中也有求解二维流体绕经橢圆柱体的流场和力距这一经典问题的初步分析。据说科学院的叶笃正先生当年读研究生时就精读Lamb的名著Hydrodynamics并作了不少推导，为当时及后来的研究打下了扎实的基础。在名著上化时间应该是很值得的。

以前文化大革命期间全国上下全民学习《毛主席语录》，可以用轰轰烈烈来形容那场学习运动。后来毛主席说，不要读语录，语录会断章取义，要读原著，读马列原著。结果有段时间全国上下就开展了读马列原著的运动。如果我没记错的话，当时组织大家读的最多的马列原著应该是恩格斯的《反杜林论》。看来毛主席关于“读原著”的论述也能应用到科学研究领域。读语录有时会误事。我们在科学研究中应该提倡大家：

少读语录，多读原著，精读名著。
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Reference:

[1] 春潮带雨晚来急 —“野渡无人舟自横”的写作札记 [王振东]
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-205890-247963.html
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coolboy

It has been almost half a century since the publication of Batchelor’s textbook in the field of fluid mechanics. I believe the following textbook is comparable to the one by Batchelor in terms of clarity.

Kundu, P. K., 1990: Fluid Mechanics, Academic Press, Inc., New York, 638 pp.

The textbook also introduces many modern special topics in a self-contained fashion, such as “perturbation techniques”, “instability”, “turbulence”, “gravity waves with rotation”, “propulsive mechanisms of fish and birds”, “oblique shock wave”, and etc. Though many of those topics are presented much more comprehensively in various monographs, it is really nice to get a general understanding from a textbook of fluid mechanics in general. In addition, the textbook is especially good to students in the fields of atmospheric and oceanic sciences because it includes a significant portion of geophysical fluid dynamics.

coolboy

Atmospheric motions occur on a sphere of a planet (Earth). Therefore, when the Navier-Stokes equations are applied to the field of atmospheric motions, it is natural to write the so-called primitive equations in a spherical coordinate. A systematic way to do this, i.e., to derive various differential operators with respect to a vector in curvilinear coordinates (i.e., tensor analysis) and to arrive at the equations of motion for the atmosphere under a special setting of a spherical coordinate, is given by the following textbook for atmospheric dynamics:

Dutton, J. A., 1976: The Ceaseless Wind. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 579 pp.
Dutton, J. A., 1986: Dynamics of Atmospheric Motion (Formerly The Ceaseless Wind). Dover, New York, 617 pp.

Thus, Dutton’s textbook has a chapter introducing the tensor analysis. The first edition of the book (The Ceaseless Wind) was translated into Chinese by my classmate and me in the summer vacation period of our junior year. The translation process was a hard work but we also had lots of fun. The translation forced us to intensively learn and understand the contents of the book. One thing that struck me most in that process and also influenced me a lot in my whole lifetime since then was a more careful deliberation habit: I thought I understood one sentence or paragraph well if I read or composed it either in Chinese or English, however, I soon realized that I did not understand or did not mean what I was trying to express if I started to translate the sentence or paragraph between two languages. In other words, one needs to first fully understand the content before making a good translation, i.e., the scientific translation forces one to have a careful deliberation habit. The translation process also made me familiar with the contents of the book, which were often recalled or referenced later in my researches. Specifically, the so-called “transport theorem” that was very well presented in this book but not explicitly mentioned in other textbooks was frequently recalled in my research career. For example, the idea shown in the following paragraph is closely related to the concept of the “transport theorem” described in Dutton’s textbook:

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[讨论]伯努利方程是能量方程还是动量方程？  [8楼]
http://www.cfluid.com/thread-114265-1-1.html

另外，守恒律一般可写成两种不同的形式：（1）全导数型，（2）通量型。伯努里方程及其推导和上面[6楼]所有的讨论是建立在全导数型的表达方式上的。这时就有“沿流线的积分”及“沿流线为常数”等的说法。若采用通量型的守恒律，则我们就有（固定）流入流出面（口）的差值同体积内部源汇的守恒关系等的描述。
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