Another note on scientist biography series

Previously I blogged about some biography book series featuring scientists, notably here and here.  The latter post mentioned the Blackwell Science Biographies series that migrated to Cambridge University Press, as well as a more general biography series at Oxford University Press (OUP) called Lives and Legacies, that has featured two physicists, Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin. 

Somehow I neglected to mention in my post on the Cambridge Companions series, that Oxford University Press has an Oxford Handbook of Newton currently in development.  Some of the chapters have been published online, and they look quite promising.

I recently learned of another Blackwell series, Blackwell Great Minds, that currently resides at the publisher Wiley.  Like OUP's Lives and Legacies, it is a very general series not focused on scientists.  However, I know of two scientists who have volumes dedicated to them:  Darwin and Newton.  (There is also a volume on Descartes.)  So it seems among the larger intellectual history culture, Darwin and Newton may be the most consequential scientists.  Both of them are represented in the following series:

• Cambridge Companions.
• Very Short Introductions (OUP).
• Cambridge Science Biographies.
• Oxford Portraits in Science.
• Blackwell Science Biographies (Wiley).

In addition, Newton is represented in the Oxford Handbooks series and the OUP's Lives and Legacies series.  He is even represented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series!  (So are Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish.)  However the Bloomsbury Handbooks series features only one scientist I know of, Emilie du Chatelet (forthcoming later this month).

Prometheus' Great Minds series on physics

Continuing the theme of my last post, the publisher Prometheus (which is now owned by Roman & Littlefield) has perhaps a more extensive catalog of "classics" in physics and astronomy than the others mentioned in my previous post.  As far as I can tell, their Great Minds series includes:

• Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics:  An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and Gravitation.
• Fred Holye's Of Men and Galaxies.
• James Clerk Maxwell's Matter and Motion.
• William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait's The Elements of Natural Philosophy.
• Marie Curie's Radioactive Substances.
• Michael Faraday's The Forces of Matter.
• Johannes Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World.  (Selections of both works are published together in a single volume.)
• Nicholaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres.
• Galileo Galilei's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.
• Isaac Newton's Principia.
• Albert Einstein's Relativity.

Some of the above volumes consist only in selections, rather than the entire work.

This series is perhaps second only to Dover Publications in its effort to keep in print some of the classic works in the history of physics and astronomy.

Oxford World Classics volumes on physics

Continuing a theme from my post last year on the Norton Critical Editions in natural science, today I'd like to take a look at another series, the Oxford World Classics.  This is a series of classic works, mostly in literature, though other subjects are included, including natural science.  There are two volumes of Charles Darwin's works, two of Sigmund Freud's, and a few works in medicine and natural history.  I'm going to focus here on works in physics.  As far as I can tell, there are only three:

• Aristotle's Physics.
• Galileo's Selected Writings.
• Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems.

I see then that this series does not overlap with Norton's, whose only physics contribution I know of are selected works of Newton.  The other, and most famous, competing series is, of course, the Penguin Classics, of which there are well over a thousand volumes.  Theirs is a catalog so vast that I have not attempted to mine it to see what volumes of physics interest there may be.  However, according to Wikipedia, one is Albert Einstein's Relativity:  The Special and General Theory.  I see that separately, Penguin also publishes The Essential Einstein, edited by Stephen Hawking, a collection of selected works.

Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science celebrates 50th anniversary

The Verlag von Julius Springer, now called Springer Nature, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science this year.  As I write this, there are over 13,800 volumes published in the series, though most of the earliest ones are long out of print.  The series also boasts two subseries, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics.  Most of the volumes in LNCS are actually meeting/conference proceedings.  Indeed, almost 20 years ago I co-authored a paper published in the refereed proceedings of a workshop that appeared in LNCS.  In the nearly 2 decades since, that paper has garnered well over 300 citations, according to Google Scholar.  Based on that n=1 case, I would say that the series successfully disseminated the research we reported in our contribution.

DTLR congratulates Springer on the 50th anniversary of LNCS.

Norton Critical Editions in natural science

Continuing a slight diversion that began with my November 2021 post on the Cambridge Companions series, let's consider independent publisher W. W. Norton's series of Critical Editions.   The Norton Critical Editions are annotated editions of classic works, mostly of literature, along with editorial apparatus including context and commentary.  Until recently I owned only one NCE, of Machiavelli's The Prince, and was not aware that any books in the series covered natural science.  I recently became aware that there are at least three NCEs on natural science:  two on biology, and one on physics and mathematics.  One is an NCE of James Watson's The Double Helix, edited by Gunther Stent (1980), and the other two are anthologies of selected writings of Isaac Newton (ed. by I. B. Cohen and R. S. Westfall, 1995) and Charles Darwin (ed. by P. Appleman, 1970; 3d edition, 2001).  If that is a complete list of NCEs in natural science, then it has been over 20 years since the last one was revised, while no others have been issued.

These books seem to be intended for use in humanities courses.  The volume on Newton, which I recently acquired, does have some technical material, but is not dominated by it.  And perhaps this explains why there are no other NCEs for physicists.  Too bad!

The Oxford Handbook of Newton

Happy New Year.  In my November post on scientists and the Cambridge Companions, I made a passing reference to the Oxford Handbooks series.  As far as I knew then, there is no Oxford Handbook dedicated to a physicist.  I have discovered just this evening, however, that an Oxford Handbook of Newton is in development; individual chapters are being posted online as they are finalized.

I would also like to call attention to an unnamed philosophy series from Cambridge University Press, whose volumes are titled Interpreting _____:  Critical Essays.  Two physicists (Newton and Mach) and one mathematician (Godel) have volumes devoted to them in that series.  There are also volumes on other philosophers including specialists in the philosophy of science, including Kuhn and Feyerabend.

Scientist biography series

Somewhat related to the theme of recent posts (here and here), let's look at a couple of scientific biography series from the two gigantic British academic presses, Cambridge and Oxford.  

Cambridge University Press has a Cambridge Science Biographies series.  At the time of writing, there are ten volumes listed in print on the website.  These are serious biographies running into the hundreds of pages.  There are three devoted to physicists:  Galileo, Newton, and Ampere.  There are three for chemists:  Lavoisier, Humphry Davy, and Justus von Liebig.  There are two for biologists:  Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.  Rounding out the set are Henry More and Mary Somerville.  I've always understood that Somerville was a mathematician, but the table of contents indicated she worked in physical and Earth sciences as well.  Henry More was a name unfamiliar to me.  Apparently he is primarily viewed as a philosopher, but he pursued experimental science as well, and was an influence on Newton.  Since these are substantial biographies, I would imagine no attempt is made to cover all the major figures in science.  Otherwise the choice of Ampere over Einstein would be most curious!

Oxford Portraits in Science are shorter biographies intended for young adult readers.  At the time of writing I see 17 volumes in print.  However, I own copies of the volumes on Faraday and Einstein, and they list additional volumes that may be out of print.  I will  include them here and group them collectively as follows:

Biologists & physiologists:  Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Crick & Watson (a single volume covering both).

Chemists: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling.

Physicists & astronomers:  Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Ben Franklin, Faraday, Joseph Henry, Curie, Rutherford, Fermi, Einstein

Inventors and technologists:  Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Babbage, Thomas A. Edison.

Behavioral scientists:  Pavlov, Freud.

Anthropologists:  Margaret Mead.

Paleontologists:  Othniel Charles March & Edward Drinker Cope (a single volume covering both).

In the above accounting, I've included the Curie volume under both physics and chemistry; it could be argued that Rutherford should also be so counted.

Here, we might have a greater expectation than with the Cambridge Science Biographies, that the most important, or at least most interesting, scientists be included.  However, none of the chemists in the Cambridge series appear in the Oxford series.  The selection of biologists/physiologists is an excellent one, but could certainly be expanded further.  Again I will focus mainly on the physicists/astronomers.   The Oxford series has an excellent list - all of them are deserving.  As I've stated before, volumes on Tesla and Feynman would probably sell as well, if only they existed.  The inclusion of Franklin and Henry, American contributors to electromagnetic science, raises the question of why non-Americans in this field have not been included (such as Ampere, Oersted, and above all Maxwell).  Again it seems to me that Niels Bohr might deserve a volume.  

Finally, as a dessert for this discussion, what about Princeton University Press's "The Quotable..." series?  These are books of quotations by various authors.  Three scientists are included:  Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman.  Maybe you might consider Jung as a behavioral scientist.  Others in the series include Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Soren Kierkegaard.  I suppose this is the most subjective of all, since the person in question has to be very "quotable"!

Scientists and Very Short Introductions

Continuing the parlor game from my last post, let's look at Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series, or VSIs, as well as its predecessor, the Past Masters series.  In contrast to the multi-authored Cambridge Companions, the VSIs are short, pocket-sized introductions to subjects (including famous individuals) by typically a single author.  However, like the Oxford Handbooks, the VSIs have respectable coverage of science topics, something the Cambridge Companions generally lack.  Again, the usual suspects (Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Bertrand Russell) all have volumes dedicated to them - they all did work in mathematics or physics, though that work is not what secured them their places in this series.  (Pascal's was a Past Masters that did not get transferred to the VSIs.)  There are no VSIs for individuals who were primarily mathematicians.

Again, in biology only Darwin has a volume, and I see no chemists represented.  Among physicists, we have Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Michael Faraday, and Niels Bohr.  Strangely there is no VSI for Einstein!  C'mon now!!  By the same token, Cambridge Companions needs to catch up and issue volumes for Copernicus, Faraday, and Bohr.  And any list of great physicists must include James Clerk Maxwell, though I do not know whether his influence on the humanities has been as great as the others mentioned here.  

Turning to economics, there are VSIs for Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, and Lord Keynes, but Hayek is missing.  (As Malthus is missing from the Cambridge Companions.)  Past Masters had a single volume covering Smith, Malthus, and Keynes, but like Pascal's, this one did not get transferred to the VSIs.

Scientists and the Cambridge Companions

Today we veer a little from our usual terrain.  The Cambridge Companions book series consists of anthologies of articles meant to introduce and provide context for major writers and thinkers, topics, and historical periods.  The subjects covered are primarily in the humanities.  The major areas listed include American Studies, Ancient Worlds, Culture, Classical Literature, Law, Linguistics, Literature and Drama, Management, Music, Philosophy, and Religion.  The list of subtopics is quite detailed, with Philosophy of Science being the only one remotely related to science, engineering, and medicine.  Yet, I've noticed a few scientists end up having volumes dedicated to them.  It is interesting to dwell on those scientists whose work has had ripple effects on the humanities.

First, to dispose of the obvious, what crops up under "Philosophy of Science"?  Four volumes, on the following subjects:  Einstein, Piaget, Darwin's Origin of Species, and Philosophy of Biology.  Not mentioned there is that there is also a Cambridge Companion to Darwin, now in its second edition, as well as volumes for Bacon and Carnap.  When you click on the subject "General Science", the volumes for Darwin and Newton (also in second edition) join Philosophy of Biology.   As far as I know, Darwin is the only biologist with a volume dedicated to him, and I can't think of a single chemist who has one.

Let's turn to mathematics.  Clicking on this subject yields two volumes, Einstein and Frege.  However, we know that others to whom volumes are dedicated have done important work in mathematics:  Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Bertrand Russell, for instance.  It is safe to say their mathematical work is probably not the principle reason they have volumes dedicated to them, however.

Let's sidestep a little and consider economics.  Two volumes pop up when you click on that subject:  Keynes and Hayek.  However, we know that there are also volumes on Adam Smith and Karl Marx.  There are also volumes dedicated to other thinkers who wrote about economics, but who might not primarily be considered "economists", such as John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill.

What I mainly wanted to write about here though is physics.  There are 3 volumes dedicated to physicists:  Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.  Obviously, some of the individuals mentioned above (Descartes, Pascal) and others (Thomas Hobbes) with Companions of their own, did work in physics as well, but Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are the ones that can be considered primarily physicists.  It is true that these three are revolutionary figures in the history of physics, and that their work did ripple out and influence philosophy and culture more broadly.  Each of them also worked in multiple areas of physics.

So, this raises an amusing question:  what other physicists might deserve a Cambridge Companion?  One hint is a set of books, not formally part of a series, published by Oxford University Press with a very similar format.  Three 19th century British physicists have such volumes dedicated to them:  Maxwell, Kelvin, and Stokes.  They are certainly deserving and were pivotal figures in the history of physics; however it might be argued that their impact on the humanities has not been as large as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.  (Two obvious missing physicists from that 19th-century British set include Michael Faraday and Lord Rayleigh.)  Perhaps Niels Bohr might come closer to a good candidate.  At the more popular culture level, Nikola Tesla and Richard Feynman are obvious candidates (and such volumes would probably sell well), and Steven Weinberg certainly wrote prolifically for a general audience.  I will have to say though, the selection of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are the most obvious choices to start with, and thus the series chose wisely.

The same parlor game could be played for biology, chemistry, and mathematics.  I don't know the history of these fields well enough to suggest candidates.  However, in logic (a field that overlaps with philosophy) an obvious and deserving figure would be Kurt Godel.  In economics, perhaps Herbert Simon or James M. Buchanan might be considered.  Among the geosciences, perhaps Alfred Wegener (of continental drift) and Edward N. Lorenz (of the butterfly effect) might be considered.

Of course, with Philosophy of Biology in the series, one could easily add volumes on the other major scientific disciplines, though these are frequently well served by other publishers (like the much more expensive Oxford Handbooks series, which generally has wider coverage than the Cambridge Companions). 

A tribute to Academic Press' Mathematics in Science and Engineering series

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Academic Press' acclaimed International Geophysics book series, which published a total of 104 volumes, the last one in 2014.  Though many volumes remain in print, it is unclear if any new volumes are anticipated.

Today I'd like to pay tribute to another Academic Press book series, Mathematics in Science and Engineering.  Academic Press is now part of Elsevier, and the latter's website shows that this series, apparently launched in 1961, is still going strong, with the latest volume published earlier this year.  Volume 1 was titled Concepts from Tensor Analysis and Differential Geometry, by Tracy Y. Thomas.  Sixty years later, the series published Luigi Berselli's Three-Dimensional Navier-Stokes Equations for Turbulence.  The website seems to suggest that the last numbered volume was #213, published in 2010, and at least 7 volumes have been published since then.  The longevity of a 60-year old series is truly impressive.

Scanning the list of titles and authors, there are indeed some impressive contributions.  Remarkably, I only own one of these volumes, Morton Gurtin's An Introduction to Continuum Mechanics (1981), volume 158 of the series.

A tribute to McGraw-Hill's fluid mechanics books

Let's wrap up the current round of book publisher tributes with this look at McGraw-Hill's books on fluid mechanics.  Like Wiley discussed in the last post, McGraw-Hill published two widely used introductory fluid mechanics texts, the venerable one by Victor L. Streeter and coauthors, which seems to now be finally retired, and the more recent one by Frank M. White, just out in its 9th edition.  I have neither book, but their authors are represented in the following photo.

Some McGraw-Hill fluid mechanics books.

Streeter's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics was part of the publisher's Handbook series, which was quite prolific in its day.  It was joined in the series by McGraw-Hill's more recent Fluid Flow Handbook, edited by Jamal Saleh (2002), now also out of print.  White's Viscous Fluid Flow (2d edition above; the 4th edition came out this year) was part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Mechanical Engineering, as were the 7th edition of Schlichting (shown above), John D. Anderson's Modern Compressible Flow, Frank S. Sherman's Viscous Flow, and J. O. Hinze's Turbulence.  Also seen above is Katz & Plotkin's Low-Speed Aerodynamics, part of McGraw-Hill's Series in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering, which itself was once edited by Anderson.  Evidently a number of books in that series were cross-listed with the Mechanical Engineering Series.

The Brodkey & Hershey text seen on the right in the photo is a representative of McGraw-Hill's Chemical Engineering Series.  It must have been a flagship for the publisher, as the pre-title pages explain its history dating back to 1925.  It brags that the series "stands as a unique historical record of the development of chemical engineering education and practice.  In the series one finds the milestones of the subject's evolution:  industrial chemistry, stoichiometry, unit operations and processes, thermodynamics, kinetics, and transfer operations."  A few books in the series are still available from the publisher today.

The three books on the right illustrate the handsome livery of these engineering series, though Brodkey & Hershey's is hidden by the dust jacket.

A tribute to Wiley's fluid mechanics books

Let's now consider the fluid mechanics books published by John Wiley & Sons.  They are particularly strong in the markets for widely used engineering textbooks.  For instance, they publish the successors to both the Fox & McDonald and Munson, Young, & Okiishi introductory fluid mechanics texts, each on their 9th editions at the time of writing.  They also publish multiple texts in heat & mass transfer, including the classic Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot, pictured below.

Representative Wiley fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

The Handbook of Fluid Dynamics and Fluid Machinery seen on the left was published in 1996.  It seems unlikely such a behemoth will ever be published again, by any publisher.  Gulf's Encyclopedia of Fluid Mechanics was published between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, for a total of 13 volumes, probably setting the record for largest fluid mechanics reference work.  The most recent such reference work I know of is CRC Press's Handbook of Fluid Dynamics (2016), which appears in a single volume.

Ronald Panton's Incompressible Flow is a favorite upper-level textbook, now in its fourth edition.  The red and white livery of the second edition, seen above, reminds me of the similar livery of its Wiley sibling, Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics 2/e, which you can see in this earlier post.  Also seen above is Lex Smits' introductory textbook, and the first of Hunter Rouse's 2-volume series of hydraulics texts.

Wiley keeps in print two classic monographs on waves:  J. J. Stoker's 1957 Water Waves:  The Mathematical Theory with Applications (currently available as a Wiley Classics Edition, but also in a much less expensive Dover reprint), and G. B. Whitham's 1974 Linear and Nonlinear Waves, published as part of Pure and Applied Mathematics: A Wiley Series of Texts, Monographs and Tracts.  Similarly, Wiley has several key books on gas dynamics, including Zucrow & Hoffman's two volume Gas Dynamics (1976), and the more modern Zucker & Biblarz, Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics, now in its 3d edition (2019).  Marcello Lappa has published two monographs with Wiley:  Thermal Convection (2010) and Rotating Thermal Flows in Natural and Industrial Processes (2012).

A tribute to Springer's fluid mechanics books

We're on a roll!  Let's now consider the fluid mechanics books published by Springer-Verlag.  They are a prolific publisher with footprints in nearly every subfield of fluid mechanics.  Let's start with some classics.  Today Springer publishes the current editions of some iconic books that originated with other publishers.  Ludwig Prandtl's Essentials of Fluid Dynamics was first published in English in 1952 by Blackie & Sons in the UK and Hafner in the U.S.; its original German publisher in 1931 was Vieweg, I believe.  The current (3d) English translation of the 12th German edition is published by Springer in its Applied Mathematical Sciences series (vol. 158).  Incidentally, vol. 5 of the same series is another classic, Fluid Dynamics by Richard von Mises and Kurt O. Friederichs (1971).  Finally, Boundary-Layer Theory, edited by Hermann Schlichting, was first published in 1954 in German by G. Braun; its English translation was previously published in the McGraw-Hill Series in Mechanical Engineering.  However the current (9th) edition (co-edited by K. Gersten) is published by Springer.

Of course, the monumental Handbuch der Physik, edited by S. Flugge, was also published by Springer.  Volume VIII was on fluid mechanics, while Vol. III covered classical and nonlinear continuum mechanics.

Here are a few other Springer fluids books in my personal collection.

A sample of Springer-Verlag fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

Stanisic's book appeared in Springer's Universitext series, while Brekhovskikh & Goncharov's is Vol. 1 of the Springer Series in Wave Phenomena.  Chorin & Marsden's classic text appears as Vol. 4 in the series Texts in Applied Mathematics.  Constantinescu's book appears in Springer's Mechanical Engineering Series, while Rieutord's appears in the series Graduate Texts in Physics.  Other classics include Langlois' Slow Viscous Flow, Daniel D. Joseph's two-volume Stability of Fluid Motions (which appeared in the now-defunct series, Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy), and Swinney & Gollub's edited Topics in Applied Physics volume, Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence.  Students of hydrodynamic instability will also note Chossat & Iooss' The Couette-Taylor Problem, and Schmid & Hennigson's Stability and Transition in Shear Flows, both of which appeared in the aforementioned Applied Mathematical Sciences series as vols. 102 and 142, respectively.  The current (4th) edition of Marcel Lesieur's Turbulence in Fluids appears in Springer's Fluid Mechanics and its Applications series.

A tribute to Oxford University Press's fluid mechanics books

Here I will continue my series of tributes to book publishers in fluid dynamics with a look at Oxford University Press.  Their books in this field have an impressive pedigree, beginning with the 1938 publication of the 2-volume Modern Developments in Fluid Dynamics:  An Account of Theory and Experiment Relating to Boundary Layers, Turbulent Motion and Wakes.  This cornerstone in the history of fluid mechanics was written by the Fluid Motion Panel of the U.K.'s Aeronautical Research Committee, later renamed the Aeronautical Research Council of Great Britain, and collaborators, and edited by Sydney Goldstein.  These books were reprinted in 1965 by Dover.  In 1951, the Council saw the need to amplify the original volumes, and added Modern Developments in Fluid Dynamics:  High Speed Flow (1953), also in two volumes, written by the Council's Fluid Motion Subcommittee, and collaborators, and edited by Leslie Howarth.  Oxford published all four of these volumes in its Oxford Engineering Science series (which is confusing to me, because they apparently had another, later series of the same name, which I wrote about previously).

Instead of continuing in the Oxford Engineering Science series, a new series was then planned by the British Aeronautical Research Council: The Fluid Motion Memoirs, also published by Oxford's Clarendon Press.  As far as I know, two volumes were published:  Incompressible Aerodynamics:  An Account of the Theory and Observation of the Steady Flow of Incompressible Fluid past Aerofoils, Wings, and other Bodies (1960), edited by Brian Thwaites, and Laminar Boundary Layers:  An Account of the Development, Structure and Stability of Laminar Boundary Layers in Incompressible Fluids, together with a description of the Associated Experimental Techniques, edited by Louis Rosenhead (1963).  A volume on turbulence was commissioned, but I'm not sure if it was ever published.  I also don't know if the Fluid Motion Memoirs continued beyond these volumes.

Meanwhile, in 1961, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar's Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability appeared in Oxford's International Series of Monographs in Physics.  This book was a landmark in the literature of hydrodynamic instability, and remains in print by Dover.  

With the superb foundation established by the publication of the above, Oxford has continued to contribute to the literature in this field up to the present.  I already mentioned McComb's turbulence monograph in an earlier post.   Oxford has another book on the subject of turbulence by P. A Davidson (whom we also met my post about the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics).  Here are some other Oxford fluid mechanics books in my personal collection.

Some fluid mechanics books published by Oxford University Press.

The introductory texts by Acheson and Lighthill are classics, as is the monograph by Tritton, all pictured above. Acheson's text appears in the Oxford Applied Mathematics and Computing Science Series.  Tritton's and Lighthill's books feature the livery of Oxford Science Publications, though Lighthill's is also included in the Institute of Mathematics and It Applications Monograph Series as its Volume 2.  The text by Bruus shown above belongs to the Oxford Master Series in Condensed Matter Physics.

A tribute to Cambridge University Press's fluid dynamics books

Extending the theme from the last post, let's examine Cambridge University Press's books in fluid mechanics.  I daresay that nowadays, they are the foremost publisher in this field.  In addition to the books discussed below, they publish the foremost journal in the business, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.  

Of course, many of Cambridge's fluid mechanics books have appeared in the "red" series Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics, already discussed in the last post.  Let's begin this one with a snapshot of some of their non-series books in my personal collection.

Cambridge University Press fluid mechanics books in my collection.

The books by Batchelor, Lamb, and Drazin & Reid pictured above are acknowledged classics.  To that list I should add George Batchelor's The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence (1953, second edition 1970), C. C. Lin's The Theory of Hydrodynamic Stability (1955), and Waves in Fluids (1978) by James Lighthill.  In the more contemporary era, the turbulence texts by Stephen B. Pope (Turbulent Flows) and Mathieu & Scott (An Introduction to Turbulent Flow) are notable, as is the 2004 A Gallery of Fluid Motion, which features a selection of award-winning photos from the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics' so-named annual competition.  Cambridge also has multiple books in transport phenomena and astrophysical fluid dynamics.

Of particular note is their series, Cambridge Monographs on Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, which began in 1952.  Many of the entries are now long out of print, though the series continues to be active today, with the next volume scheduled for publication next year.  I'm not sure how many total books have appeared in the series, but the "Applied Mathematics" part of the series' title has been dropped for some time.  Like the Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics "red series" discussed in the last post, the titles and authors in this series are notable; in fact many are shared with that series.  Both series range beyond just fluid mechanics, but I'll focus on fluid mechanics in this post.  Here are the volumes from that series in my personal collection.

Family portrait of the Cambridge Monographs in Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in my personal collection.

Like the "red series", these books have a uniform livery:  dark blue hardcovers, with green dust jackets; the paperbacks have green covers mimicking the hardbacks' dust jackets.  For this reason I refer to them as the "green series" in contrast to the "red series".  Aside from those pictured, other notable entries include Buoyancy Effects in Fluids, by J. S. Turner, The Structure of Turbulent Shear Flow, by A. A. Townsend, The Fluid Mechanics of Large Blood Vessels, by Tim Pedley, and Magnetoconvection, by N. O. Weiss and M. R. E. Proctor.  The Drazin & Reid monograph, Hydrodynamic Stability, shown in the first photo above, originally appeared in the "green series" as well; sadly its reprints do not feature the green livery of its siblings.

A tribute to Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics

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!

A family portrait of Cambridge Texts in Applied Mathematics in my personal collection.

A tribute to the publishers of classic engineering science books: the Oxford Engineering Science Series

Back in December DTLR had a series of posts in tribute to the publishers of classic books in physics and atmospheric science.  I'd like to return to that theme by paying homage today to the Oxford Engineering Science Series.  As far as I know, the series began with the publication in 1974 of Synthesis of Planar Antenna Sources, by Donald R. Rhodes (Volume 1 of the series).  The last contributions I know of are Volume 51, Electromagnetic Waveguides and Transmission Lines, by Frank Olyslager, published in 1999, and a second edition of Volume 14, Engineering Rheology, by Roger I. Tanner, published in 2000.  

Here are a few members of the series in my personal book collection.

Volumes 2, 10, and 36 of the Oxford Engineering Science Series

As can be seen from the photo, these books were also branded as Oxford Science Publications.  Also illustrated in the photo, Peter Hagedorn's Non-Linear Oscillations (Volume 10) was another example of a member of the series that came out in a second edition (1988).  Unfortunately now even this edition appears to be out of print.  Other volumes with multiple editions include Collier & Thome's Convective Boiling and Condensation (3d edition, 1996) and Wesson's Tokamaks (4th edition, 2011), though this latter moved to the same publisher's International Series of Monographs in Physics (a series that continues to go strong today).  Other volumes actually appear in two-volume sets (collectively issued the same series number):  these include Jones' Methods in Electromagnetic Wave Propagation (1979) and Thornton's Science and Practice of Liquid-Liquid Extraction (1992).  Jones' book was issued in a second edition co-published by IEEE and Wiley (1994), in their Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory.

In the photo, Hagedorn's book is flanked by Les Woods' 1975 book, The Thermodynamics of Fluid Systems (Vol. 2), and Beris & Edwards' 1994 contribution, Thermodynamics of Flowing Systems with Internal Microstructure (vol. 36).  (Woods was one of the series editors for many years as well.)  The Hagedorn and Beris & Edwards volumes illustrate the elegant blue and red livery of the paperback and hardback volumes of the series in its middle years.  The hardbacks even had gold trim on the covers; the photo does not do it justice.  Unfortunately, the paperback livery in the most recent years resembles that of other (less elegant) Oxford Science Publications.

Unfortunately I do not own a copy of Volume 25, The Physics of Fluid Turbulence, by W. David McComb (1990).  Interestingly, McComb later (2014) published a second work on turbulence, Homogeneous, Isotropic Turbulence:  Phenomonology, Renormalization and Statistical Closures, which appeared instead in Oxford's International Series of Monographs in Physics, where Wesson's Tokamaks also moved, as mentioned earlier.

As for the Oxford Engineering Science Series, like Academic Press's International Geophysics Series that I wrote about earlier, the publisher websites list them as active, but no new volumes have been published in a long time.  I do wonder if any of these series will continue (the McGraw-Hill and Addison-Wesley series I wrote about earlier seem to be long-defunct), given the dynamics of scientific publishing in recent years.

A tribute to the publishers of classic atmospheric science books

The last four posts celebrated the publishers of classic physics books.  Today I'd like to pay homage to publishers of classic atmospheric science books.  Several of the major publishers we've already met - Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer, and Wiley - all have major contributions to this literature and appear to remain active in this field.  I will spare readers a laundry list of examples from these publishers.

The main focus of this post is to honor Academic Press, which became an imprint of Harcourt, and now Elsevier.  Wallace & Hobbs' Atmospheric Science:  An Introductory Survey and the 6-volume Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences are signature examples of their portfolio.  However, what "AP" may most be known for is its long-lived International Geophysics Series, which began in 1959 with volume 1, Beno Gutenberg's Physics of the Earth's Interior.  Its most recent volume was published 55 years later, the second edition of Robert Houze's Climate Dynamics, vol. 104 of the series.  The publisher's website lists this as a still-active series, but I do not know of any new volumes since 2014.  Each volume in the series was numbered, and new editions of existing books received their own volume number.

At one time, the series editor was William L. Donn of Columbia University, but later in "my" era (the late 1990s and early 2000s) the editors were Renata Dmowska (Harvard) and James R. Holton (U. Washington), joined later by H. Thomas Rossby (U. Rhode Island).  The series covered all of geophysics, but as the focus today is on atmospheric sciences, let me name a few prominent entries:  Holton's own An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology, Fleagle & Businger's An Introduction to Atmospheric Physics, Salby's Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics (a later edition of which is published by Cambridge University Press), Curry & Webster's Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, Brown's Fluid Mechanics of the Atmosphere, Cushman-Roisin's Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Gill's Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics, Arya's Introduction to Micrometeorology, Marshall & Plumb's Atmosphere, Ocean, and Climate Dynamics, Chamberlain's Theory of Planetary Atmospheres, and Wilks' Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences.  One could go on and on.

In "my" era, the series volumes did not have a uniform "look", unlike the old McGraw-Hill International Series on Pure and Applied Physics, with their green covers with black and gold trim.  Nonetheless, with a 55-year run including many classics, the International Geophysics Series is ubiquitous on atmospheric scientists' bookshelves. 

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: Others

I am winding down my tribute to publishers of classic physics books in this post, though future posts will examine publishers in other subjects.

Springer-Verlag, of course, is a huge publisher in mathematics, engineering, and physics.  I already discussed their Lecture Notes series in an earlier post.  They are also the publishers of Walter Thirring's Course in Mathematical Physics and a series of texts lead-authored by Walter Greiner.  Of particular note was their series Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy, whose yellow covers resembled some of the Springer math texts.  The series is listed as discontinued on the Springer website.  Other highlights include Florian Scheck's Mechanics, Jack Vanderlinde's Classical Electromagnetic Theory (originally published by Kluwer), and Statistical Physics I:  Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics by Toda, Saito, and Kubo.  They also have legendary reference books like the long-out-of-print Handbuch der Physik, and the AIP Physics Desk Reference.  Springer was founded in 1842 by Julius Springer.

Cambridge University Press is another titan, with classics going back to Brian Pippard's The Elements of Classical Thermodynamics (1957) and Chapman & Cowling's The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases (first published in 1939).  Examples of notable texts include Kleppner and Kolenkow's An Introduction to Mechanics, Hand & Finch's Analytical Mechanics, Jose & Saletan's Classical Dynamics:  A Contemporary Approach, Zangwill's Modern Electrodynamics, Born & Wolf's Principles of Optics (originally published by Pergamon), and Ralph Baierlein's Thermal Physics.  They also have the Student's Guide series, exemplified by Daniel Fleisch's A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations.

Oxford University Press is particularly strong in thermal & statistical physics texts, with examples such as Blundell & Blundell's Concepts in Thermal Physics, Bowley & Sanchez's Introductory Statistical Mechanics, and David Chandler's Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics.  They have many others including Hilborn's Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics and a particularly useful series, the Oxford Master Series in Condensed Matter Physics and a counterpart series for Statistical, Computational, and Theoretical Physics.

Cambridge and Oxford University Presses were founded in 1534 and 1586, respectively, laying claim to be the world's oldest and second-oldest university presses.

Finally I will mention a few publishers with relatively smaller footprints, at least in my collection of physics books.

Methuen's Monographs on Physical Subjects included some gems such as J. W. Leech's Mechanics and Derek F. Lawden's An Introduction to Tensor Calculus and Relativity.  Algernon Methuen founded the company in 1892.

W. H. Freeman, founded in 1946, was an imprint of Macmillan.  Its classic physics texts include Charles Kittel's Introduction to Solid State Physics (now published by Wiley), Kittel & Kroemer's Thermal Physics, Lorrain, Corson, & Lorrain's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, and Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics.

W. B. Saunders, originally a medical publisher founded in 1888, was known as the publishers of Raymond Serway's introductory physics textbook, as well as classics such as Marion & Thornton's Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, and Ashcroft & Mermin's Solid State Physics.  These are now published by Cengage. Due to a merger with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Saunders acquired Grant Fowles' Analytical Mechanics, now also published by Cengage.

For many years, Prentice-Hall was the publisher of David J. Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, now both published by Cambridge University Press, and Douglas C. Giancoli's introductory physics text, now published by Pearson.  Prentice-Hall was founded in 1913 by Charles Gerstenberg and Richard Ettinger, naming the firm after their mothers' maiden names.

Independent publisher W. W. Norton, founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton and his wife Mary Dows Herder Norton, publishes the MIT Introductory Physics Series (principle author, Anthony P. French) as well as Hans Ohanian's introductory physics textbook.  Speaking of MIT, the MIT Press was the original publisher of the English version of Wolfgang Pauli's Lectures on Physics (now reprinted by Dover).

Academic Press (founded in 1941 by Walter J. Johnson and his brother-in-law Kurt Jacoby) is now part of Elsevier, but was the original publisher of the English version of Arnold Sommerfeld's Lectures on Theoretical Physics.  

Princeton University Press (founded in 1905 by Whitney Darrow) publishes Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford's series, Modern Classical Physics, as well as cosmology books by P. J. E. Peebles, Roger Newton's philosophical essay Thinking About Physics, and Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation.  They also have the Princeton Series in Physics and Einstein's Collected Papers.  Princeton also has a "Nutshell" series, for instance, Anupam Garg's Classical Electromagnetism in a Nutshell, which at over 700 pages is quite a large nut.

University Science Books is a niche player, with notable books by John R. Taylor, Frank Shu, David McQuarrie, and John Townsend.  Another niche publisher is Infinity Science Press, with titles like Ohanian's Classical Electrodynamics.  The Chicago Lectures in Physics are published by the University of Chicago Press, and includes Robert Geroch's Mathematical Physics.  Johns Hopkins University Presss has a few titles of note such as Don Lemons' Mere Thermodynamics.

World Scientific, a Singapore-based publisher started in 1981 by Phua Kok Khoo and Doreen Liu, has a few notable titles such as Kibble & Berkshire's Classical Mechanics (on behalf of Imperial College Press) and Fritz Rohrlich's Classical Charged Particles.

Finally, all physics readers should be grateful to Dover for keeping some of our favorite classics in print.

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: John Wiley & Sons

Unlike McGraw-Hill and Pearson, discussed in the last posts, who seem to have downsized their footprints in advanced physics books, John Wiley & Sons continues to maintain an active presence to this day.  Also unlike the previously discussed counterparts, Wiley tends not to place their classic physics books in series; each is a standalone volume.  They can be very proud of their portfolio, as illustrated by the all-stars illustrated in the below photo.

A selection of all-star classic physics texts from Wiley.

The Cohen-Tannoudji books are illustrative of the onetime partnership with French publisher Hermann, which also resulted in co-publication of Order within Chaos, by Berge, Pomeau, and Vidal.  We see also that over the years, Wiley acquired Interscience (a US firm founded by Kurt Enoch around the time of WW2) and German publisher VCH (Verlag Chemie), which was founded by the German Chemical Society in 1921.

Historical note.  Wiley traces its history to Charles Wiley, who started a printshop in 1807.  His  son John took over in 1826, who was in turn succeeded by his own sons William H. and Charles in 1876.