A First Course in Computational Fluid Dynamics
H. Aref, S. Balachandar
Cambridge University Press
This book has been in preparation for over a decade. Hassan Aref and I had
been making substantial additions and revisions each year, in our desire to reach
the perfect book for a ﬁrst course in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). I
sincerely wish that we had completed the book a few years ago, so that Hassan
was there when the book was published. Unfortunately this was not the case.
September 9th 2011 was a tragic day for ﬂuid mechanics. We lost an intellectual
leader, a fearless pioneer and for me an inspirational mentor. It is quite amaz-
ing how my academic career intersected with Hassan’s over the years. He was
my Masters Thesis advisor at Brown University. But when Hassan left for the
University of California at San Diego, I decided to stay and ﬁnish my PhD at
Brown. A few years later, when I was an assistant professor at the Theoretical
and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–
Champaign, he was appointed as the head of the department. This is when he
asked me to join him in this project of writing a non-traditional introductory
book on CFD. The project was delayed when Hassan moved to Virginia Tech
as the Dean and I moved to the University of Florida as the Chair of the Me-
chanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. His passing away a few years
ago made me all the more determined to ﬁnish the book as a way to honor his
memory. I am very glad that the book is now ﬁnished and can be a monument to
his far-sighted vision. Decades ago when CFD was in its infancy he foresaw how
powerful computers and numerical methods would dominate the ﬁeld of ﬂuid
mechanics.
