The Library Shelf

This unusual book gives a combined account of three different branches of dynamics, dealing with particles, fluids and solid bodies. The preface explains the history of the course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on which the book is based. When instruction in aeronautical engineering was started at M.I.T., some forty years ago, the branch of the subject that was most fully developed from a rational viewpoint was the theory of dynamic stability. The students, with only an elementary training in mathematics and mechanics, found this theory of stability too difficult to grasp, and a course was therefore started to bridge the gap between the mathematics and mechanics that the students already knew and the complex problems of aircraft stability.