Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2006
By a consideration of the relationships holding along the characteristics in an unsteady motion involving plane, axially or spherically symmetrical flow of compressible inviscid fluid, it is shown that the existence of a region of compression anywhere in the flow must lead eventually to the breakdown of continuity. The paper generalizes and unites previous work on this topic, and discusses some recent numerical calculations in which the expected discontinuity was not found.