Customer Reviews

Flow: Nature's patterns: a tapestry in three parts

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People who like equations and complex charts will be disappointed, it doesn't feel like hard sciences. You will need to dive in the references of this book to crunch maths.

The subject is extremely interesting and you don't need to be a physician, a mathematician or an engineer to understand what it is about. It is dense, precise, sometimes a bit funny with few but good references in fine art. I highly recommend this book as a first reading for people who want to arouse their interest in fluid mechanics and morphogenesis (generation of shapes). The format is friendly (small and thin, nice hard-cover) and chapters well ordered, really pleasant and informative.

There are 3 books in this serie, "branches" starts well, I'm just at the beginning of it, but I have a good feeling... !

I read the book as one who was trained in the discipline of fluid mechanics, but left the field thirty years ago. Its main aim which is usually met seems to be the presentation of phenomena of interest along with simplified explanations, in an accessible way. One danger is that explanations are not only simple but wrong, and I think there are a few such instances, for example in the discussion of vortex shedding. I am doubtful if the author has done much justice to complex ideas and topics, such as links between phenomena, and the whole domain of turbulence studies; the reason for even mentioning the Navier-Stokes equations in a book of this type is beyond me. I found the mix of text and figures generally satisfying but the heavy annotation of many of the latter was irritating; a bit like books where footnotes occupy vast areas.
The book is certainly not a primer for further study, but one could do worse than use it for a 'once in a lifetime' dip into the field.