Every physicist should know some fluid dynamics, and every university physics department should include the subject in its core curriculum. Those propositions can readily be justified by pointing out the usefulness of the subject – its relevance to diverse areas of contemporary research and to a vast range of problems of practical importance. What counts as much for me, however, is that most of the students I have known at Cambridge have enjoyed their limited exposure to it. The notion that the only way to arouse the enthusiasm of physicists is to teach them about quarks and black holes is in my view a myth.

I hope that this book will slightly increase the chance that future generations of physicists will be taught the subject systematically, in a way that I and my contemporaries were not. However, since newer branches of physics may continue to displace it, I have tried to write something that may be read for pleasure as well as for instruction by physicists of any age and at almost any level of sophistication who want to learn fluid dynamics for themselves. They do, of course, have many books to choose from already, but most of them were written for mathematicians or engineers. Students of all three disciplines – mathematics, physics and engineering – speak the same language and have many objectives in common, but they differ in their approach to new problems because their intuition has been honed in different ways, and they also tend to differ in what they find interesting.