1. Foundation of Fluid Mechanics

In 250 B.C., Archimedes (ancient Greeks, 287–212 B.C., as shown in Fig. 1.1), commissioned by King Syracuse of Sicily to examine the crown, studied the principle of force balance and proposed the famous hydrodynamic buoyancy theorem, which is also a part of hydrostatics. During this period, the achievements of Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and other ancient Greek scientists mainly stayed at the philosophical level. At the mathematical level, Pythagoras put forward the concept that everything is a number and discovered the Pythagorean law. After A.D. until the Renaissance, society was dark and scientific development was slow. During the Renaissance (fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries A.D.), with the emergence of the new capitalism, the demand for handicraft and mechanical industries greatly promoted the development of mathematics and mechanics.