In his preface to this book, Professor G. I. Barenblatt recounts the saga of the course of mechanics of continua on which the book is based. This saga originated at the Moscow State University under the aegis of the renowned Rector I. G. Petrovsky and moved with the author first to the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology, then to Cambridge University in England, then to Stanford University, until it reached its final home as a much loved and appreciated course at the mathematics department of the University of California, Berkeley. Those not fortunate enough to have been able to attend the course now have the opportunity to see what has made it so special.

The present book is a masterful exposition of fluid and solid mechanics, informed by the ideas of scaling and intermediate asymptotics, a methodology and point of view of which Professor Barenblatt is one of the originators. Most physical theories are intermediate, in the sense that they describe the behavior of physical systems on spatial and temporal scales intermediate between much smaller scales and much larger scales; for example, the Navier–Stokes equations describe fluid motion on spatial scales larger than molecular scales but not so large that relativity must be taken into account and on time scales larger than the time scale of molecular collisions but not so large that the vessel that contains the fluid collapses through aging.