91av

Run a bath and you can flummox the world’s best physicists with turbulence,
the erratic churning and bubbling flow of a liquid. But after hundreds of years
of enquiry, a multitude of mind-twisting equations and more than a few trashed
computers, scientists are catching on. In Dynamical Systems Approach to
Turbulence, physicists Tomas Bohr, Mogens Jensen, Giovanni Paladin and Angelo
Vulpiani run through the modern maths for taming turbulence by way of chaos
theory, fractals and multifractals, nonlinear field theories, and a few even
weirder concepts, such as “absolute curdling”, stolen from the dank corners of
the common fridge. Published by Cambridge University Press, £45, ISBN
0521475147.