Part IB Fluid Dynamics resources

Posted on Fri 06 February 2026 in Physics

Fluid dynamics is a huge and broad topic spanning physics, maths, engineering, geosciences, and many more. The introductory course only scratches the surface of classical fluid dynamics theory; and there is much fascinating, but accessible, material for the aspiring fluid dynamicist. This page lists some of my favourites, and it will be updated from time to time.

Reference material

The Schedules define the limits of the course (specifically, a lower bound for lectured material and an upper bound for examinable material).

Examples Sheets for this and other DAMTP courses.

Books and lecture notes

  • Horace Lamb's textbook Hydrodynamics is a classic, and takes a mathematically-detailed (first-principles) approach to setting up the equations of motion and applying them to many domains. The notation or language may be a little dated in places.

  • John Hinch has notes on all sorts of relevant topics, especially the Part II courses.

  • David Tong's lectures and book on fluid dynamics. The first few chapters roughly cover the material in Part IB and the subsequent chapters make for good reading.

Cool pictures

Computational methods

  • John Hinch has a Part III course on this.

  • FreeFem++ is a very accessible and user-friendly package for getting started with fluid flow simulations.

Non-Newtonian fluids

  • Nathalie Vriend's notes on granular flows (archived, may be incomplete). Granular materials are an area of very active research with important economic and geophysical applications. Classical fluid dynamics has had some success describing their behaviour but there are important differences that have proven difficult to model.

Stability theory

Fluid dynamics has been an important driver in the study of dynamical systems, especially stability theory; it continues to be an area of active research.

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