Last December DTLR had a series of posts in tribute to the publishers of classic physics and atmospheric science books, and followed up in April with a post on the Oxford Engineering Science series. Today I'd like to honor a famous series in applied mathematics, the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics. As far as I can tell, the series began in December 1987 with Maximum and Minimum Principles by M. J. Sewell. By the time I began grad school in 1995, there were barely over ten volumes in the series. I am delighted to see from the publisher's website that there are now nearly 60 volumes in the series, and it is still going strong, with the most recent entry issued earlier this year. Nearly all of them remain in print, though in one case a superseded first edition is only available in electronic form (specifically, P. A. Davidson's An Introduction to Magnetohydrodynamics). The familiar red livery of the series has been maintained with minimal changes since its beginning.
The list of titles and authors is supremely impressive, and it would be an honor to be published in this series. Here I'll only mention some of the contributors of more than one volume. Philip G. Drazin was one prolific contributor, with texts on Solitons (with R. S. Johnson), Nonlinear Systems, and Introduction to Hydrodynamic Stability. Grigory I. Barenblatt contributed Scaling, Self Similarity, and Intermediate Asymptotics, a text named simply Scaling, and most recently Flow, Deformation, and Fracture. Johnson also has a book on water waves, and E. J. Hinch has a pair of contributions: Perturbation Methods and Think Before You Compute. He is also a series editor, and other series editors have contributed themselves too. For example, Mark J. Ablowitz has Complex Variables (now in second edition with co-author A. S. Fokas) and Nonlinear Dispersive Waves. Editor John R. Ockendon contributed Viscous Flow (authored with his wife Hilary) and Applied Solid Mechanics (authored with Peter Howell and Gregory Kozyreff).
As a theoretical fluid dynamicist, my personal collection of books from this series is heavily weighted toward that topic, but I own only a fraction of the available texts even in that subtopic. Unlike previous posts in this series, this is the first one where I can say I had the pleasure of asking some of the authors to sign my copy of their books - specifically the Ockendons' Viscous Flow (I met them both at the same conference) and Charlie Doering's Applied Analysis of the Navier-Stokes Equations (coauthored with J. D. Gibbon, whom I have not met). Many years later, I was stunned to discover that Doering and his students cited one of my research papers in their work. I first became aware of their interest when I attended an APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, on a lark one year (I had long since ceased to be active in the field). I had dropped in on a session related to my old stomping grounds, and midway listening to one of the students' talks, I realized he was discussing a paper I had coauthored!
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| A family portrait of Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics in my personal collection. |
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