From Archimedes to supersonics

In recent years the great interest in supersonic aerodynamics has overshadowed the other fields of fluid mechanics to a very large extent. The glamor and romance of high speed have caught the fancy of almost everyone so that one might suspect that little or no fluid mechanics exists outside the area of supersonics. Yet there is scarcely any field of physics which reaches further into antiquity for its origins and is at the same time more modern than fluid mechanics. Its history is studied with great names in science from Archimedes through the Bernoullis down to Jukowski, Prandtl, and von Karman in the present era.

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