Essays in the History of Mechanics

"At university, my interests turned sharply towards applied mathematics, and, in particular, fluid mechanics. And it was while doing research in that subject that I eventually came across this immensely scholarly book by Clifford Truesdell, which immediately got me interested in the history of maths, and the notion of returning – where possible – to original sources. It made me realise, in particular, how classical mechanics owes as much to Euler and the Bernoulli family as it does to Galileo and Newton . And I found Truesdell’s essay “Whence the Law of Moment of Momentum?” particularly striking for the light that it shed on the unsatisfactory and almost bizarre way in which the angular momentum principle for a rigid body is introduced in virtually every mechanics textbook of the 20th century. Truesdell himself seems to have been something of a character, not least because one of his published research papers in the 1960s was in Latin."