"… warmly recommended to many undergraduate students and also to graduate students and researchers who, new to continuum spirit, would like to acquire a brief acquaintance with it at very small expense. In any case, it beautifully paves the way for the understanding of more technical books…" Mathematical Reviews "The book achieves its stated aims in the sense that students will be encouraged, from the interesting range of phenomena presented, to pursue the subject further, and will not be daunted when they meet key concepts within a three-dimensional framework." Journal of Fluid Mechanics "… a lot of stimulating phenomenological … examples, like car traffic, aggregation of slime mold amoebae, blood flow, and the heart." Mathematics Abstracts Many textbooks on continuum mechanics plunge students in at the 'deep end' of three-dimensional analysis and applications. However a striking number of commonplace models of our physical environment are based entirely within the dynamics of a one-dimensional continuum. This introductory text therefore approaches the subject entirely within such a one-dimensional framework. The principles of the mathematical modeling of one-dimensional media constitute the book's backbone. These concepts are elucidated with a diverse selection of applications, ranging from tidal dynamics and dispersion in channels to beam bending, algal blooms, blood flow, and the greenhouse effect. The book is ideally suited to elementary undergraduate courses as it makes no use of multivariable calculus. A number of graded problems are included at the end of each section.