Official description

The static, kinematic, and dynamic behaviours of fluids have huge import in physics, engineering, earth sciences, and life sciences -- fluid mechanics is a basic scientific literacy in your graduate physics education. The subject brings with it almost its own way of thinking. Because of this, we’ll emphasize principles of fluid mechanics heavily, then hand-in-hand with them develop skills applicable to different domains of fluid mechanics. Our physics approach will be to introduce basic kinematic models, enhance relevant mathematical ideas, develop equations of motion, and then explore the consequences. After simple steady flows, we will consider wave propagation for different kinds of fluids including gravity-driven density waves, the plasma two-fluid model, and then stretch into dynamics as far as time allows, to instabilities such as Rayleigh-Taylor instability in supernovae and laser-driven inertial fusion.