Half a century ago, Sir James Lighthill lamented about the volume of publications:
‘‘I think that a lot of us are publishing too much. We turn things out as soon as we
have finished them, instead of putting them in a drawer and just thinking about them
from time to time. If, when you have done one of these brilliant, involved bits of
mathematics, you would just put it in a drawer, there would be so much the less for
people to have to read!’’[127]. The culture of publish or perish* has not changed.
Today, we drown in an avalanche of books, journals, technical papers, conference
proceedings, and electronic media. It was not, therefore, without trepidation that I
ventured to write this book. I kept asking myself: Do we need one more textbook on
computational fluid dynamics?