Publisher's Synopsis
This book presents topics of science and engineering occuringin nature and/or are part of our daily lives. The described natural/engineering phenomenaare modelledby partial differential equations, which relate physical variables like mass, velocity, energy, etc. to their spatial and temporal variations. Typically these equations are highly nonlinear, in many cases they are also vectorial systems, and they represent a challenge evenfor the most modern and sophisticated mathematical-analytical and mathematical-numerical techniques. Thetopics chosenin the book, which reflect the longtime scientific interests of the author are briefly presented in their scientific or engineering context and then the mathematical models in the form of partial differential equations areintroduced and their basic mathematical properties are discussed. The author illustrates each chapter by a series of high quality photographs demonstrating that partial differential equations can be used for a large variety of phenomena.
