Luc Tartar – författare

In the spring of 1999, I taught (at CARNEGIEMELLON University) a graduate course entitled Partial Di?erential Equations Models in Oceanography, and I wrote lecture notes which I distributed to the students; these notes were then made available on the Internet, and they were distributed to the participants of a Summer School held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 1999. After a few years, I feel it will be useful to make the text available to a larger audience by publishing a revised version. To an uninformed observer, it may seem that there is more interest in the Navier–Stokes equation nowadays, but many who claim to be interested show such a lack of knowledge about continuum mechanics that one may wonder about such a super?cial attraction. Could one of the Clay Millennium Prizes bethereasonbehindthisrenewedinterest?Readingthetextoftheconjectures to be solved for winning that particular prize leaves the impression that the subject was not chosen by people interested in continuum mechanics, as the selected questions have almost no physical content. Invariance by translation or scaling is mentioned, but why is invariance by rotations not pointed out 1 andwhyisGalileaninvariance omitted,asitistheessentialfactwhichmakes 1 Velocities involved for ordinary ?uids being much smaller than the velocity of light c, no relativistic corrections are necessary and Galilean invariance should then be used, but one should be aware that once the mathematical equation has been written it is not automatic that its solutions will only use velocities bounded by c.

After publishing an introduction to the Navier–Stokes equation and oceanography (Vol. 1 of this series), Luc Tartar follows with another set of lecture notes based on a graduate course in two parts, as indicated by the title. A draft has been available on the internet for a few years. The author has now revised and polished it into a text accessible to a larger audience.

Equations of state are not always effective in continuum mechanics. Maxwell and Boltzmann created a kinetic theory of gases, using classical mechanics. How could they derive the irreversible Boltzmann equation from a reversible Hamiltonian framework? By using probabilities, which destroy physical reality! Forces at distance are non-physical as we know from Poincaré's theory of relativity. Yet Maxwell and Boltzmann only used trajectories like hyperbolas, reasonable for rarefied gases, but wrong without bound trajectories if the "mean free path between collisions" tends to 0. Tartar relies on his H-measures, a tool created for homogenization, to explain some of the weaknesses, e.g. from quantum mechanics: there are no "particles", so the Boltzmann equation and the second principle, can not apply. He examines modes used by energy, proves which equation governs each mode, and conjectures that the result will not look like the Boltzmann equation, and there will be more modes than those indexed by velocity!