Foreword by A. J. Chorin

Summary

For the past seven years students and faculty at the University of California at Berkeley have had the privilege of attending lectures by Professor G.I. Barenblatt on mechanics and related topics; the present book, which grew out of some of these lectures, extends the privilege to a wider audience. Professor Barenblatt explains here how to construct and understand self-similar solutions of various physical problems, i.e. solutions whose structure recurs over differing length or time scales and different parameter ranges. Such solutions are often the key to understanding complex phenomena; there is no universal recipe for finding them, but the tools that can be useful, including dimensional analysis and nonlinear eigenvalue problems, are explained here with admirable conciseness and clarity, together with some of the multifarious uses of self-similarity in intermediate asymptotics and their connection with wave propagation and the renormalization group. Whenever possible, Professor Barenblatt shuns dry and distant abstraction in favor of the telling example from his incomparable stock of such examples; with the appearance of this book, there is no longer any excuse for any scientist not to master these simple, elegant, crucial and sometimes surprising ideas.