Earthquakes, a plucked string, ocean waves crashing on the beach, the sound waves that allow us to recognize known voices.
Waves are everywhere, and the propagation and classical properties of these apparently disparate phenomena can be described by the same mathematical methods: variational calculus, characteristics theory, and caustics.
Taking a medium-by-medium approach, Julian Davis explains the mathematics needed to understand wave propagation in inviscid and viscous fluids, elastic solids, viscoelastic solids, and thermoelastic media, including hyperbolic partial differential equations and characteristics theory, which makes possible geometric solutions to nonlinear wave problems.
